Ben Roberts-Smith arrested over alleged war crimes

Former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has reportedly been arrested after an investigation into alleged war crimes.

Australia’s most decorated soldier was arrested at Sydney airport on Tuesday following allegations he murdered unarmed Afghan civilians while deployed there between 2006 and 2012.

Nine newspapers were the first to report the former soldier who had been arrested was 47-year-old Roberts-Smith.

Australian Federal Police commissioner Krissy Barrett and Office of the Special Investigator director Ross Barnett will front the media at 12.15pm to address the arrest.

The OSI probes potential criminal matters raised in the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force’s Afghanistan inquiry report.

A Federal Court judge has previously found Roberts-Smith was responsible for a number of killings in a blockbuster defamation trial.

Justice Anthony Besanko’s findings were on the balance of probabilities, rather than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.

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.

The alleged war criminal has maintained his innocence.

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.

Mr Roberts-Smith also stood silent while a rookie soldier was ordered to execute an elderly Afghan prisoner so he could be “blooded”.

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.