Australia's Most Decorated Soldier Arrested, Faces Five War Crime Murder Charges

Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia's most decorated living soldier and the holder of the Victoria Cross, was arrested at Sydney Domestic Airport on Tuesday after arriving on a flight from Brisbane, becoming the highest-profile figure yet to face criminal charges from the country's long-running war crimes investigation into Afghanistan deployments.

Roberts-Smith, 47, a former corporal with the elite Special Air Service Regiment, is expected to face five counts of war crime murder, each carrying a maximum penalty of life in prison. He denies all wrongdoing and was expected to appear in a New South Wales court on the day of his arrest.

AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett confirmed the arrest at a press conference, stopping short of naming Roberts-Smith directly and referring instead to "a 47-year-old former ADF member." She was explicit about the nature of the alleged conduct: "It will be alleged the victims were detained, unarmed, and were under the control of ADF members when they were killed," Barrett said, adding that the victims "were not taking part in hostilities at the time of their alleged murder." She characterised the alleged behaviour as "confined to a very small section of our trusted and respected ADF."

The five charges span Roberts-Smith's deployments to Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012. Two counts allege he intentionally caused the death of two individuals himself; the remaining three allege he aided, abetted, counselled or procured another person to commit murder on separate occasions.

The charges follow years of investigation by the Office of the Special Investigator, a body created specifically to pursue criminal matters arising from the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry. That inquiry, led by Major General Paul Brereton, a Judge of the New South Wales Court of Appeal, published its final report in 2020 after being commissioned in 2016. The Brereton Report found credible evidence of at least 23 incidents involving 39 unlawful killings carried out by 25 ADF personnel across operations in Afghanistan between 2005 and 2016. The Australian Federal Police first received a referral to investigate war crimes allegations in November 2018.

Roberts-Smith joined the Australian Army in 1996 at age eighteen and built one of the country's most celebrated military careers. He received the Medal for Gallantry in 2006 for actions in Afghanistan and, in 2011, was awarded the Victoria Cross for Australia, the highest gallantry award available to ADF members, for his conduct during a 2010 operation targeting a senior Taliban commander. His profile reached such heights that the Australian War Memorial mounted a special exhibition featuring his uniform and two specially-commissioned portraits.

That celebrated image has been under sustained legal and institutional pressure since 2018, when Roberts-Smith launched defamation proceedings against three Nine Entertainment publications: the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the Canberra Times. Investigative reporter Nick McKenzie was among those whose work Roberts-Smith sought to challenge. In June 2023, Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko issued a 726-page judgement dismissing the case, finding the publications had established the claims were substantially true under Australian defamation law. Besanko found Roberts-Smith had murdered four unarmed Afghan civilians, including shooting dead a man with a prosthetic leg using a machine gun, taking the prosthetic back to Australia and encouraging soldiers to use it as a drinking vessel, and kicking a handcuffed farmer off a cliff before the man was shot dead. On 4 September 2025, the High Court refused his application for leave to appeal that judgement and ordered him to pay costs.

The criminal arrest has renewed calls to revoke his Victoria Cross, a step with almost no precedent. Only eight of the more than 1,300 Victoria Crosses awarded across Commonwealth nations have ever been revoked. The Australian Greens had already called for the VC's rescission and the removal of his uniform from the Australian War Memorial following the defamation judgement. Now, with criminal charges formally in play, the question of what Australia does with the honours it confers on its soldiers sits at the centre of a reckoning the country has been reluctant to complete.