‘Didn’t bloody murder’: Roberts-Smith interview airs

Australia’s most decorated soldier has rejected accusations he drank out of the prosthetic leg of an unarmed Afghan man after he was gunned down, in a lengthy interview with a radio shock jock.

Ben Roberts-Smith, a former SAS soldier, was arrested in April and charged with the war crime offences of murdering or ordering the murders of five unarmed detainees while deployed in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.

Sydney’s 2GB host Ben Fordham has presented extended extracts of a 2.5-hour interview in which he asks Roberts-Smith explicitly if he shot civilians during his service.

“I didn’t bloody murder anyone,” the 47-year-old said in extracts aired on Thursday morning.

In a series of rapid-fire questions, Roberts-Smith bluntly denied the accusations levelled against him.

“Did you shoot prisoners?” Mr Fordham asked.

“No,” Roberts-Smith replied.

“Did you see anyone else shooting prisoners?”

“No.”

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

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

But Roberts-Smith bluntly rejected allegations he drank from it.

“I didn’t drink out of it, which is just the truth. I did not and that’s for personal reasons,” he told Mr Fordham.

“The dark humour that … military organisations rely upon to maintain their sanity will sometimes be misconstrued.”

Former defence minister Joel Fitzgibbon was quick to lend his support to the soldier, ringing in to Mr Fordham’s show to express his sympathies.

“What the system has done to him is an absolute disgrace,” the now-lobbyist said on Thursday.

He criticised the lack of forensic weight attached to the allegations levelled against him “rather than spend hundreds of millions of dollars pursuing our war heroes.”

In the wide-ranging conversation conducted in Queensland on October 8, and due to be published in full on YouTube later on Thursday, Roberts-Smith said he conducted himself professionally in the theatre of war.

“I wouldn’t change a single thing. I would do it all exactly the same way because I know that I did the right thing,” he said on Thursday.

“I know I did whatever I could to keep my mates alive.

“But I never broke the rules of engagement.”

At times emotional and choking back tears when discussing members of his battalion killed during service, the former SAS soldier insisted he did not partake in extrajudicial killings.

“I’ve never committed a war crime in my military career,” he said.

“I’ve never murdered a prisoner, and everything I did was inside the laws of armed conflict.”

The Victoria Cross recipient is accused of machine-gunning Afghan prisoner Mohammed Essa and ordering the execution of his son Ahmadullah to “blood the rookie” during a raid at a compound in April 2009.

The then-SAS soldier allegedly placed firearms on the bodies to falsely claim they were enemy combatants, court documents said.

In August 2012, at the village of Darwan, Roberts-Smith is accused of kicking a handcuffed man named Ali Jan off a 10-metre cliff before ordering that he be dragged to a creek bed and shot.

Two months later at Syahchow, he allegedly lined up two prisoners in a corn field before shooting one of them with another soldier.

He ordered a subordinate to shoot the other prisoner before throwing a grenade on the bodies to cover up what he had done, prosecutors allege.

“All I’m asking for is a fair shake, mate,” Roberts-Smith said regarding the ongoing court case.