Army brass had no real interest in investigating alleged warfare crimes by the SAS, an inquiry has heard
British SAS operatives got a “golden cross permitting them to get away with homicide” in Afghanistan, a former UK Particular Forces officer has informed a authorities inquest. Different witnesses described routine executions of unarmed civilians by British forces.
The officer’s assertion was given behind closed doorways to the UK’s Unbiased Inquiry Referring to Afghanistan earlier this yr, and included in a trove of paperwork revealed by the inquiry on Tuesday.
The previous officer raised issues concerning the killing of unarmed civilians in 2011, claiming that the SAS was masking these crimes up. The officer stated that higher-ups inside UK Particular Forces – which contains the Particular Air Service (SAS), the Particular Boat Service (SBS), and 4 different clandestine branches of the British navy – had no real interest in investigating the killings, and that SAS operatives had basically been handed a “golden cross permitting them to get away with homicide.”
The Afghanistan Inquiry is probing evening raids carried out by British particular forces between 2010 and 2013, when the alleged killings befell.
A junior officer informed the inquest that “all preventing age males” have been killed in these raids, no matter whether or not they have been armed or not. SAS personnel generally carried weapons to drop beside useless our bodies after the killings as a way to make them seem as combatants.
Prisoners have been generally executed after they’d been restrained, the witness recounted. “In a single case, it was talked about a pillow was put over the pinnacle of a person earlier than being killed with a pistol,” the doc famous.
The inquiry is investigating the killings of no less than 80 prisoners.
”I suppose what shocked me most wasn’t the execution of potential members of the Taliban, which was after all improper and unlawful, nevertheless it was extra the age and the strategies and, you recognize, the small print of issues like pillows,” the officer stated, noting that a few of the victims have been “100%” aged 16 or youthful.
The officer stated that he was afraid for his personal security after testifying.
”Mainly, there seems to be a tradition there of ‘shut up, do not query’,” one other officer informed the inquiry.
Claims of warfare crimes dedicated by British particular forces in Afghanistan have surfaced earlier than, with BBC Panorama, the Sunday Instances, and different retailers claiming that civilians have been routinely killed on evening raids. In a single case, the American navy reportedly had video footage of 1 bloodbath, however mysteriously misplaced the footage when pressed by a British courtroom.
Late final yr, the BBC reported that one of many UK’s most senior generals had withheld from the most recent inquiry proof of troopers executing handcuffed detainees in Afghanistan.
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