Ministry of Defence officials concluded privately in a 2019 letter that allegations to be aired in a BBC Panorama on alleged SAS war crimes were “broadly accurate”.
Despite the internal warning, the MoD’s response in 2019 sought to deny the claims, pointing out Royal Military Police investigations into the alleged war crimes had resulted in no prosecutions.
The letter, from a senior MoD official to then-defence secretary Sir Ben Wallace, was one of several internal documents cited on Monday at the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan.
The inquiry is examining whether there is credible evidence that the SAS unlawfully killed people on night raids.
The letter informed Sir Ben that “the level of detail” in Panorama’s request for comment “suggests they have spoken to well-placed sources”.
It went on to warn him that there was “a risk that these sources will have provided Panorama with documents that will enable them to substantiate these allegations”.
The request from the BBC related to allegations that the SAS had repeatedly killed unarmed detainees and civilians on night raids in Afghanistan, as well as allegations that RMP investigations into the alleged killings had been improperly closed down.
The BBC subsequently reported in 2022 that one SAS unit had unlawfully killed 54 people in in one six-month tour.
Sir Ben told the inquiry that he had always wanted to get to the bottom of the allegations against the SAS, and that when made aware of concerns about special forces operations in Afghanistan he had repeatedly sought more information about those concerns.
The internal MoD documents disclosed in court on Monday showed that, despite the department’s conclusion that there were “broadly accurate” allegations in the letter from the BBC, officials “should continue to resist allegations of widespread systemic abuse and criminal behaviour” and “should rebut Panorama’s allegations about investigations and decisions being improperly influenced”.
Another document shown in court revealed that before signing off the reply to the BBC’s request for comment, Sir Ben had sought out and read a classified memo written by a very senior member of UK Special Forces that outlined serious concerns over alleged SAS murders in Afghanistan.
The memo, written in April 2011, said that there appeared to be “an unofficial policy” among SAS squadrons to kill any fighting-age Afghan male during a raid “regardless of the immediate threat they pose to our troops”.
It added: “In some instances this has involved the deliberate killing of individuals after they have been restrained by [the SAS] and the subsequent fabrication of evidence to suggest a lawful killing in self-defence.”
The BBC revealed last year that the memo was locked away in a safe, despite a law which requires every commanding officer in the armed forces to report any evidence of war crimes to the Royal Military Police.
Asked about the memo in court on Monday, Sir Ben said the memo was a “very important document and the allegations that followed from it were very important”.
He added that he was “concerned” about the contents of the memo, “but I also refer you to the date – it was a decade before my time”.
Sir Ben said he would have expected the commanding officer of the special forces unit responsible, and the then-director special Forces, General Jonathan Page, to refer the allegations to the RMP.
“There was no excuse for the commanding officer or the Director Special Forces not to have referred that to police,” he said. “It is inexcusable.”
Pressed by the inquiry team about whether he had sought out the source of the allegations in the memo – a whistleblower from within special forces – Sir Ben acknowledged that he had not.
At the time Panorama wrote to the MoD ahead of its programme, in 2019, the ministry was preparing to announce the closure of Operation Northmoor, a wide-ranging RMP investigation into more than 600 allegations against the British military.
Northmoor was closed down in late 2019 with no charges. Senior officers from the RMP’s Northmoor team have told the BBC that their investigation was closed prematurely, despite the team having obtained credible evidence suggesting UK Special Forces committed extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan.
One document shown in court on Monday, titled “How to address the allegations raised in the Panorama letter”, shows that MoD officials were pushing to announce the closure of Operation Northmoor ahead of the airing of the BBC programme.
Ben Sanders, the deputy director of the MoD’s Department of Judicial Engagement Policy, wrote to Sir Ben advising that:
“BBC Panorama are finalising a programme – which we expect to be highly critical – on the historical criminal investigations from Afghanistan and Iraq … It would be highly advantageous for MoD to announce the closure of Operation Northmoor in advance.”
Sir Ben told the inquiry on Monday that he did not follow Mr Sanders’ advice, and instead instructed that the closure not be announced before the programme aired.
He told the court that he believed announcing the closure ahead of the programme would be ill-advised before knowing the exact contents of the broadcast. He added that Mr Sanders’ letter was “one submission compared to all the other submissions saying ‘all was fine’”.
Asked by the Oliver Glasgow KC, a barrister for the inquiry team, whether he followed up with Mr Sanders to enquire how the MoD legal official had come to the conclusion that the allegations were “broadly accurate”, Sir Ben replied that he did not.
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