{"id":367303,"date":"2026-04-07T04:54:09","date_gmt":"2026-04-07T04:54:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/367303\/"},"modified":"2026-04-07T04:54:09","modified_gmt":"2026-04-07T04:54:09","slug":"ex-australian-soldier-ben-roberts-smith-arrested-over-war-crimes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/367303\/","title":{"rendered":"Ex-Australian soldier Ben Roberts-Smith arrested over war crimes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested after an investigation into alleged war crimes and is expected to be charged with multiple counts of murder.<\/p>\n

Australia’s most decorated soldier was arrested at Sydney airport on Tuesday following allegations he murdered unarmed Afghan civilians while deployed there between 2009 and 2012. <\/p>\n

A statement from the AFP confirmed a 47-year-old former ADF member was expected to be charged with five counts of war crimes involving murder.<\/p>\n

The allegations include that he intentionally caused the death of two people in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.<\/p>\n

Roberts-Smith is accused of aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring another person to commit a murder on three separate occasions.<\/p>\n

He is expected to appear in a NSW court later on Tuesday.<\/p>\n

The maximum penalty for war crime murder is life in prison.<\/p>\n

\"Ben<\/p>\n

Ben Roberts-Smith. (Source: Getty)<\/p>\n

The OSI probes potential criminal matters raised in the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force’s Afghanistan inquiry report.<\/p>\n

A Federal Court judge has previously found Roberts-Smith<\/a> was responsible for a number of killings in a blockbuster defamation trial.<\/p>\n

Justice Anthony Besanko’s findings were on the balance of probabilities, rather than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.<\/p>\n

The articles, published in 2018, included claims Mr Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed man off a cliff and ordered his execution, and machine-gunned another prisoner, taking his prosthetic leg home as a souvenir drinking vessel.<\/p>\n

The alleged war criminal has maintained his innocence.<\/p>\n

Justice Besanko found Roberts-Smith machine-gunned an unarmed prisoner in the back, taking the man’s prosthetic leg back to Australia to use as a beer drinking vessel during a 2009 raid on a compound codenamed Whiskey 108.<\/p>\n

Roberts-Smith also stood silent while a rookie soldier was ordered to execute an elderly Afghan prisoner so he could be “blooded”.<\/p>\n

Justice Besanko found one of the newspapers’ central claims – that Mr Roberts-Smith had kicked an unarmed and handcuffed man, Ali Jan, off a 10-metre cliff and then ensured he was shot – was true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has been arrested after an investigation into alleged war crimes and is expected…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[85,67,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-367303","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-crime-and-justice","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-top-news","13":"tag-top-stories","14":"tag-topnews","15":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}