Oliver Schulz hearing: Ex-soldier questions ‘record of interview’

A former senior ADF member says he was encouraged by interviewers to ‘over-embellish’ answers over the alleged war crime murder of a local man in Afghanistan 12 years ago.

Oliver Shultz, an Australian soldier accused of murder while on duty in Afghanistan, arrives at Downing Centre court with lawyer Karen Espiner and his wife. Picture: NewsWire / Simon Bullard

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A former senior ADF member says he was encouraged by interviewers to “over-embellish” his answers when he was questioned for the third time over the alleged war crime murder of a local man in Afghanistan 12 years ago.

Speaking directly to the local court magistrate, the seasoned soldier raised “concerns” about a record of interview placed in front of him from three months after the alleged unlawful killing by Oliver Schulz, that was carried out post-deployment in Australia.

He said he was directed to answer questions in a “wordy” and non-specific way by investigators after he believed the matter had been fully investigated “on country”.

The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, gave evidence on Friday at the committal hearing of SAS soldier Mr Schulz, who was charged in March 2023 with the war crime of murder after footage emerged of him allegedly shooting local Afghan man Dad Mohammed three times on May 28, 2012, in a wheat field.

Prosecutor Phillip Strickland SC read out parts of the soldier’s “record of interview” from the second Inquiry Officer’s Inquiry (IOI) into the allegations in late-August 2012, carried out in Australia. The soldier said another IOI had been carried out in Afghanistan closer to the alleged unlawful killing by three senior ranked officers, as well as a less-official “Quick Assessment”.

The local Sydney courtroom, which hosted multiple ADF witnesses from the same deployment this week, heard the Australians received a complaint at the time that a male Afghan national named Dad Mohammed was shot in the head and stabbed in the neck and the heart, and killed.

Mr Strickland SC asked the soldier whether he remembered the complaint from March 28, to which he replied “there was always a complaint … anytime there was a jackpot” – a term for the killing of a target. It was the SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) of the insurgency to “rope in” the village and “see how much money we can get from you”. “The complaints would take that form and any other (form) you could possibly imagine,” he said.

Mr Strickland read out a part of the record where the soldier was asked to explain “how the Afghan male was shot”.

The soldier’s answer began with “As I understand, Sir” which appeared to suggest he had not seen the events himself. The soldier told the court he did not recall May 28, 2012 at all, or whether he was speaking from his own memory or from what he had been told.

His description in the record of interview was that as they approached the point where they believed the insurgent commander may be, this Afghan male, Mohammed, seemed to be “manoeuvring”.

They tried to “get him to stop” by using aircraft force in front of him and by throwing smoke, which he explained to the court was one way to identify the location and direction of an individual.

Oliver Schulz, 43, was charged with the war crime of murder in March 2023 after footage emerged of the alleged shooting of the unarmed Afghan man. Picture: Simon Bullard/NewsWire

The Afghan male kept evading the aircraft, the record of interview said, and “manoeuvring the force on the ground”.

They then called for him to “stop” at the top of a wheat field but he “tried to manoeuvre away” again, including by ducking and weaving.

At some point, it became unclear whether the soldier’s answers referred to the specific incident or to a more general point, and the soldier turned and spoke directly to Magistrate Greg Grogin, saying he had “concerns about how this (IOI) was done”.

He explained there was a “true IOI on country” carried out at the Tarinkot base in Afghanistan closer to May 28, looking at “all these allegations” where intelligence personnel spoke to people involved and to locals. The allegations were “fully investigated on country, much closer to the time” and he was told they were “satisfied it’s all done”.

But when he returned to Australia, he was asked to do a second IOI, the first time in his career that had ever happened. He’d done about four or five IOIs over the years, he estimated.

He also questioned the security clearances of the officer’s involved in the questioning.

This interview “back in Australia was done very differently,” he told the court. He “remembered it being very strange” that he was not being asked to speak about the particulars of the day but to answer in more “general terms”.

“I was encouraged to be as wordy as possible … and over-embellish what I was saying to give a good feel of what was going on,” he said.

Asked later to explain what he meant by “embellish”, he said to “make it as wordy as you possibly can” and to use as much detail as you understand “not only about what was there but about anything around an incident like that”.

He recalled that at one point, towards the end, he stopped the interview because “there was something remiss about it”.