{"id":538980,"date":"2026-04-19T06:40:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-19T06:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/538980\/"},"modified":"2026-04-19T06:40:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-19T06:40:08","slug":"australias-most-decorated-soldier-vows-to-fight-war-crime-charges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/538980\/","title":{"rendered":"Australia&#8217;s most-decorated soldier vows to &#8216;fight&#8217; war crime charges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The criminal case against Roberts-Smith follows a 2023 civil defamation case, in which a judge found \u2013 on the balance of probabilities \u2013 there was &#8220;substantial truth&#8221; to some of the murder claims against him.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Brought by Roberts-Smith against Nine newspapers, which first published allegations of misconduct in 2018, the high-profile trial was the first time in history any court has examined claims of war crimes by Australian forces.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">The former soldier argued the alleged killings occurred legally during combat or did not happen at all, and last year lost an appeal against the Federal Court finding.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He now faces one charge of the war crime of murder, one of jointly commissioning a murder, and three of aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring a murder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The criminal case against Roberts-Smith follows a 2023 civil defamation case, in which a judge found \u2013 on&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":538981,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-538980","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538980","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=538980"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/538980\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/538981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=538980"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=538980"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=538980"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}