Disturbing claims have emerged that police may have arrested war hero Ben Roberts-Smith in Sydney in the hopes his jury will be less White and more left-wing.
Roberts-Smith had repeatedly contacted both the Australian Federal Police and the Office of the Special Investigator to offer to present himself to be charged, but instead he was ambushed after arriving on a holiday flight and arrested in front of his two teenage daughters on Tuesday.
Video of the Victoria Cross recipient being taken into custody sparked outrage around Australia, and Liberal senator James Paterson on Sunday said he would grill the agencies on “why they chose to arrest him at that time and that place” as it had “generated significant community concern”.
SAS hero Ben Roberts-Smith has now been charged with five counts of war crime – murder, and refused bail.
He faces life imprisonment if convicted.
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The AFP and OSI have not explained why Roberts-Smith was arrested in Sydney and have denied tipping off media, but a source described by Nine Newspapers as “well-placed” has said the NSW capital may have been chosen in an effort to give prosecutors more favourable jurors.
Sydney would give investigators access to a wider and more diverse jury pool, the source said, while Roberts-Smith would likely have wanted to be tried in his more conservative adopted city of Brisbane, or in Perth where he was born and the Special Air Service Regiment is based.
At the time of the 2021 Census Sydney was 54.2% Australian-born and 6.9% Islamic, compared to Brisbane’s 64.4% and 2.3%, and Perth’s 59.5% and 2.5%, while Sydney also has Australia’s second-largest Afghan population after Melbourne.
Roberts-Smith, 47, was charged with five counts of “war crime – murder” in relation to five alleged offences in 2009 and 2012 in Afghanistan, and faces life imprisonment if found guilty.
But the identities of two of the five men Roberts-Smith is accused of murdering are still unknown to investigators, according to court documents from his defamation case seen by the Daily Mail.
One of the alleged victims, who Roberts-Smith is accused of murdering with another SASR soldier in 2012, was described as Person Under Control 1 or Enemy Killed in Action 3, while a second allegedly murdered on the same day was called Person Under Control 2 or Enemy Killed in Action 4.
A legal source told the publication the two alleged victims had “never been identified”.
“All they have are photos of dead male Afghans taken by our guys at the end of a mission,” they said.
“They are not crime scene evidence but are now being repurposed in a criminal case.”
The source added that even when Afghan individuals killed in action by Australian forces were officially “identified”, even given them a name was “sketchy at best”.
“It usually involves an Afghan saying, ‘You killed my relative, pay me money’ – which then occurs,” the source said.
The other three alleged victims have been named in Roberts-Smith’s court attendance notices as Mohammed Essa, his son Ahamadullah, and Ali Jan, and investigators allege none of the five were “taking an active part in hostilities” when they were killed.
The federal government has spent at least $318 million investigating war crimes allegedly perpetrated by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan, and in 2018 investigators published notices in Afghani newspapers in Australia calling for details of “rumours” about possible wrongdoing.
Roberts-Smith was first accused of war crimes by by leftist journalists from corporate media giant Nine Entertainment in 2017. They were aided by Liberal MP Andrew Hastie, who gave evidence against his former SASR comrade during his defamation trial.
In 2023 he lost his lawsuit against Fairfax Media and journalists Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters and David Wroe after the Federal Court found allegations against him were “substantially true” on the balance of probabilities – a lower threshold than the “beyond reasonable doubt” required in a criminal trial. He then lost an appeal, and had an application to appeal again to the High Court rejected last year.
Earlier this year it was revealed that Nine paid $700,000 in hush money to Roberts-Smith’s mistress in a secret settlement after she threatened to sue over allegations McKenzie had broken a promise not to subpoena her to give evidence or reveal her as a source in the trial.
Roberts-Smith was awarded the Victoria Cross for his heroism in a battle in Tizak in Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province in 2010 where he risked his life to kill two Taliban machine gun teams while the SASR were heavily outnumbered.
In a book published last year, The Last Battle, author Aaron Patrick revealed Roberts-Smith’s 35 Special Air Service Regiment (SASR) E Troop soldiers were betrayed during the battle by a group of Afghan soldiers who were supposed to be assisting them.
The arrest and charges have sparked an outpouring of support nationwide, and patriotic Aussies in Melbourne are holding a “Free Ben Roberts-Smith” rally on April 26.
Header image: Ben Roberts-Smith being arrested (AFP). Right, serving in Afghanistan (ADF).
The post Police arrested Ben Roberts-Smith in Sydney so he’ll face ‘more diverse jury’, source claims first appeared on The Noticer.
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