Victoria Cross Recipient Ben Roberts-Smith Charged With Five War Crime Murders

Ben Roberts-Smith, the Victoria Cross-decorated former Special Air Service Regiment corporal long celebrated as Australia's most decorated living soldier, was arrested at Sydney Airport on Tuesday morning as he stepped off a flight from Brisbane, taken into custody by the Australian Federal Police and formally charged with five counts of war crime murder.

The charges are anchored to three separate villages in Uruzgan Province across three years of his Afghan deployments. Prosecutors allege Roberts-Smith intentionally killed one person and procured the killing of a second on April 12, 2009, at Kakarak. Three further counts cover alleged murders at Darwan on September 11, 2012, and at Syahchow on October 20, 2012, where he is accused of both directly causing and procuring the deaths of Afghan men. All five alleged victims were non-combatants.

AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett, speaking at a Sydney press conference on Tuesday, laid out the prosecution's framing in stark terms. "It will be alleged the victims were not taking part in hostilities at the time of their alleged murder in Afghanistan," she said, adding that the alleged victims "were detained, unarmed and were under the control of ADF members when they were killed" and "were shot by the accused or shot by subordinate members of the ADF in the presence of, and acting on the orders of the accused." Each of the five charges carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment under the Commonwealth Criminal Code.

The charges are the product of a joint investigation by the Office of the Special Investigator and the AFP that has run since 2021, deploying 54 investigators and drawing on more than $231 million in federal funding across five years. Roberts-Smith, now 47, completed six tours of Afghanistan between 2006 and 2012. He was refused bail and held at Silverwater Correctional Complex, with a bail hearing scheduled for Wednesday in New South Wales courts.

The arrest compresses nearly a decade of public controversy into a single criminal indictment. After Nine Entertainment newspapers published war-crime allegations in 2018, Roberts-Smith launched defamation proceedings in the Federal Court against journalists Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters, and David Wroe. In June 2023, Justice Anthony Besanko not only rejected the claim but found Roberts-Smith had "disgraced his country," determining on the balance of probabilities that four murder allegations were proven, including killings during the 2009 Whiskey 108 mission in which he was found to have machine-gunned an unarmed Afghan man with a prosthetic leg. Appeals to both the Full Federal Court and the High Court were dismissed and refused in 2025.

But civil findings carry a fundamentally different burden than criminal prosecution. The balance-of-probabilities standard that felled Roberts-Smith in the defamation trial is a lower threshold than the beyond-reasonable-doubt standard prosecutors must now clear in criminal court, and authorities have been deliberate in stating that Besanko's conclusions do not constitute criminal guilt.

Roberts-Smith becomes only the second Australian soldier charged under domestic war-crimes law, following former SAS soldier Oliver Schulz, charged in 2023 over the killing of an Afghan man in a wheat field and still awaiting trial after maintaining his innocence. That case could serve as a procedural blueprint for what will almost certainly become Australia's most closely watched war-crimes prosecution.