Ministry of Defence officials concluded in a 2019 letter in private that allegations due to be broadcast in an upcoming BBC Panorama programme about alleged SAS war crimes were “broadly accurate”.
Despite the internal warning, the Ministry of Defence denied the allegations in 2019, pointing out that investigations by the Royal Marechaussee into the alleged war crimes had not led to prosecutions.
The letter, from a senior Ministry of Defence official to then Defence Secretary Sir Ben Wallace, was one of several internal documents cited by the Independent Inquiry into Afghanistan on Monday.
The inquiry is investigating whether there is credible evidence that the SAS unlawfully killed people during night raids.
Ministry of Defence (MoD) officials concluded privately in a 2019 letter that allegations due to be broadcast in an upcoming BBC Panorama programme about alleged SAS war crimes were “broadly accurate”.
Despite the internal warning, the Ministry of Defence denied the claims in 2019, pointing out that investigations by the Royal Military Police (RMP) into the alleged war crimes had not resulted in prosecutions.
The letter, from a senior Ministry of Defence official to then Defence Secretary Sir Ben Wallace, was one of several internal documents cited by the Independent Inquiry into Afghanistan on Monday.
The inquiry is investigating whether there is credible evidence that the SAS unlawfully killed people during night raids and whether the RMP’s investigation into the alleged killings was adequate.
In the letter, Sir Ben was informed that “the level of detail” in Panorama’s request for comment “suggests they have spoken to well-placed sources”.
It then warned him that “there is a risk that these sources have provided Panorama with documents that could support these allegations”.
The BBC’s request concerned allegations that the SAS had repeatedly killed unarmed prisoners and civilians during night raids in Afghanistan, and allegations that RMP investigations into the alleged killings had been wrongly closed.
The BBC subsequently reported in 2022 that one SAS unit had unlawfully killed 54 people in a single six-month period.
Sir Ben told investigators he had always wanted to get to the bottom of the allegations against the SAS. When he was made aware of concerns about the special forces’ operations in Afghanistan, he had repeatedly asked for more information about those concerns.
Internal Ministry of Defence documents released in court on Monday showed that despite the ministry’s conclusion that there were “broadly correct” allegations in the BBC letter, officials “must continue to oppose allegations of widespread systematic abuse and criminal behaviour” and “must refute Panorama’s claims that investigations and decisions were improperly influenced”.
Another document shown in court showed that before signing the response to the BBC’s request for comment, Sir Ben had retrieved and read a confidential memo written by a very senior member of the British Special Forces, in which he expressed serious concerns about alleged SAS killings in Afghanistan.
The memo, written in April 2011, said there was apparently an “unofficial policy” among SAS squadrons to kill any Afghan male of fighting age in an attack, “regardless of the immediate threat they pose to our troops”.
It added: “In some cases this involved the deliberate killing of individuals after they had been detained by (the SAS) and then fabricating evidence to indicate a lawful killing in self-defence.”
Last year, the BBC revealed that the memo was in a safe deposit box, despite a law requiring every armed forces commander to report any evidence of war crimes to the Royal Military Police.
When asked about the memo in court on Monday, Sir Ben said the memo was a “very important document and the allegations arising from it were very significant”.
He added that he was “concerned” about the contents of the memo, “but I also refer you to the date – it was ten years before my time”.
Sir Ben said he had expected the commander of the responsible special forces unit and the then director of special forces, General Jonathan Page, to pass the allegations on to the RMP.
“There was no excuse for the commander or the director of Special Forces not to report that to the police,” he said. “It’s inexcusable.”
When asked by the investigation team whether he had tracked down the source of the allegations in the memo – a whistleblower within the special forces – Sir Ben admitted he had not.
When Panorama wrote to the Ministry of Defence ahead of its programme in 2019, the ministry was preparing to announce the end of Operation Northmoor, a sprawling RMP investigation into more than 600 allegations against the British military.
Northmoor was closed without charges in late 2019. Senior officers from the RMP’s Northmoor team have told the BBC that their investigation was closed prematurely despite the team obtaining credible evidence suggesting that British Special Forces had carried out extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan.
A document shown in court on Monday, entitled “How to address the allegations in the Panorama letter”, shows that MoD officials pushed for the end of Operation Northmoor to be announced before the BBC programme aired.
Ben Sanders, Deputy Director of the Department of Judicial Engagement Policy at the Ministry of Defence, wrote to Sir Ben:
“BBC Panorama is completing a programme – which we expect to be highly critical – on the historic criminal investigations from Afghanistan and Iraq… It would be very beneficial if the Ministry of Defence could announce the end of Operation Northmoor in advance.”
Sir Ben told the inquiry on Monday that he had not followed Sanders’ advice and had instead indicated that the closure would not be announced before the programme aired.
He told the court he believed announcing the closure before the programme would be unwise before the exact content of the broadcast was known. He added that Mr Sanders’ letter was “one argument compared to all the other arguments which said ‘everything was fine'”.
When asked by Oliver Glasgow KC, a lawyer for the inquiry team, whether he had contacted Mr Sanders to ask how the Ministry of Defence legal officer had concluded that the allegations were “broadly correct”, Sir Ben replied that he had not.
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