Police are investigating claims that Australia’s most decorated soldier, who is facing an inquiry into alleged war crimes, buried sensitive defence records in his back garden.
A parliamentary hearing was told today that police were also treating as a “priority” an allegation that Ben Roberts-Smith, a former special forces soldier who won a Victoria Cross from his time in Afghanistan, attempted to intimidate a witness.
Roberts-Smith, 42 who left the army in 2013 after three deployments to Afghanistan, has denied that he hid the USB drives in his garden in Brisbane or that he threatened witnesses to stop them from co-operating with an inquiry into war crime allegations against him.
Australia’s war crimes inquiry report, which was released in redacted form in November, found credible evidence that 39 Afghans were murdered by Australian special forces.
Roberts-Smith is the only soldier who has identified himself as a subject of the judge-led inquiry. He denies all allegations of unlawful killings.
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The Sydney Morning Herald reported this week that Roberts-Smith kept USB drives with more than a dozen Department of Defence drone videos of Afghanistan military operations buried in his garden in a pink child’s lunch box.
The newspaper alleged that they included 13 videos taken by Nato-operated drones in Afghanistan as well as copies of classified operational reports from an Australian SAS mission in southern Afghanistan.
At a parliamentary budget hearing Ian McCartney, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) deputy commissioner, confirmed that police had opened an investigation into the claims. He said that police had access to “some material” that was on the allegedly buried USB drives.
Roberts-Smith is suing The Sydney Morning Herald for defamation.
The newspaper also claimed this week that Roberts-Smith had attempted to stop another special forces soldier from giving evidence over the alleged war crimes.
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McCartney said that the allegation was serious “and it is being treated as a priority by the Australian Federal Police”.
The newspaper reported that the files allegedly buried in Roberts-Smith’s garden included one created by a US military specialist embedded with the SAS. A second file is said to have been marked as belonging to the “Department of Defence”.
Other files reportedly relate to a 2009 mission in which Roberts-Smith is accused of unlawfully executing an Afghan man. He denies this.
That allegation is the subject of a federal police taskforce that was launched in 2018 and recently submitted evidence to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions.
In a statement today Roberts-Smith said that the allegation that he hid material from the war crimes inquiry was false.
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Now a senior executive with Australia’s Channel Seven television network, Roberts-Smith also denied threatening any witness or potential witness to the war crimes inquiry.
“The allegation that he buried USBs in his backyard is false. This simply did not happen,” the statement said.
“Mr Roberts-Smith risked his life for his country, having served in Afghanistan over six years through scores of missions where his safety and that of other members of the SAS was in constant jeopardy.”
