My fight to have my son’s killer executed in Afghanistan
After his son was gunned down by an ‘ally’ on an army base, Hugh Poate embarked on a quest for truth — and a long campaign to have the killer executed.
It was 9.45pm on August 29, 2012 at Patrol Base Wahab in the Dorafshan region of Afghanistan. Twelve Australian soldiers from Mentoring Team Bravo, part of the 3 RAR Task Group, were seated at two adjoining makeshift tables prior to bedding down for the night. On one table they were playing poker, on the other the board game Risk. Suddenly, a burst of automatic gunfire from a NATO-issued M-16 assault rifle was directed right at them. Then another. And another.
The men dived for cover as 26 rounds of the 30-round magazine were fired at them. Two Australians were killed, a third lay dying and two more were wounded. The soldiers killed at the scene were our son, Private Robert Poate, and Sapper James Martin. Lance Corporal Stjepan (Rick) Milosevic had also been shot but was still showing signs of life. These three soldiers and two others who had been wounded were medevaced by helicopter to the Tarin Kowt medical centre. Rick Milosevic was in cardiac arrest upon arrival and died on the operating table.
The main role of the Mentoring Task Forces was to mentor the Afghan National Army before finally handing over control of the security of Afghanistan to the ANA and the Afghan National Police. This was the fourth insider, or “green-on-blue”, attack by soldiers against Australian soldiers in 15 months. Seven Australians had now been killed and 12 wounded in these attacks.
The assailant was 19-year-old Sergeant Hekmatullah, an ANA soldier stationed at Patrol Base Wahab. He was a Taliban infiltrator. His personal mission was to kill as many Australians as he could during an insider attack because he saw them as infidel invaders in his country. Earlier that day he had made arrangements by mobile phone with the Taliban to help him flee following his attack. His plan was successfully accomplished.
All three soldiers killed that night were from the 7th Brigade at Gallipoli Barracks, Enoggera, an outer suburb of Brisbane. Their heartbroken next-of-kin met for the first time at the ramp ceremony held at the Amberley RAAF Base when the bodies of Robert, Rick and James were repatriated to Australia. For our three families to learn that our courageous boys had been murdered at the hands of someone they regarded as an ally, and for whom they had put their lives on the line, was unimaginably painful.
To make things worse, we soon started receiving reliable and very worrying first-hand information from soldiers who were returning from their tour of duty with the 3 RAR Task Group. When we added this to reputable media reports, it was becoming obvious that there were serious questions to be asked about the competence of the chain of command. The grieving families were told that Defence would internally investigate the circumstances of this attack. We were assured the investigation would be thorough. However, the heavily redacted internal investigation report received in May 2013 was far from thorough. Little did we know that our search for an honest explanation as to how it had been possible for our boys to be murdered would take us through a labyrinth of excuses, denials, half-truths and cover-ups. It would take three years and an unprecedented coronial inquest in Queensland to extract all the facts.
We would later learn that Hekmatullah came from the Taliban-controlled Ghazni Province, and that his father was an Imam and Taliban supporter. Hekmatullah had been recruited to the ANA in February 2012 and undertook basic training for two months before receiving another month of training so he could graduate as a sergeant, although he was only 19 years old. On July 15 he was assigned to the 4th Brigade, 6th Kandak (Battalion), 2 Tolay (Company) and six weeks later he would murder Robbie, James and Rick.
On that day, Hekmatullah told the ANA cook on the base of his plans to attack the Australians. That evening, when he was due to go on guard duty, he told the Afghan soldier in charge of the weapons armoury that he wanted a belt-fed PKM 7.62-calibre machine gun to attack the “foreign infidels”. The Afghan soldier refused, but Hekmatullah replied that he would attack them anyway with the M-16 rifle he was issued with for guard duty. Neither the cook nor the soldier in charge of the armoury told any superior ANA officer of Hekmatullah’s intentions. Nor did they take any action to stop him.
Here was an allied ANA soldier, who graduated from recruit training only six weeks earlier and probably had no battle experience, who was able to outsmart an Australian chain of command, supported by a team of at least 100 intelligence experts with years of experience and training. Hekmatullah adopted the very tactics, techniques and procedures that the Australians had trained him in during mentoring: conduct reconnaissance, accommodate the risk of a task, then carry it out.
On October 2, 2013, 13 months after the attack, the then chief of the Australian Defence Force, General David Hurley, called a press conference in Canberra. He announced that Sergeant Hekmatullah had been captured in Pakistan and had that day been deported to Afghanistan, where he was being held in Pol-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul. He had been taken into custody by the Pakistani Inter-Service Intelligence Agency in January 2013 and interrogated. The Australian Government had been informed of Hekmatullah’s capture the following month but had chosen to inform the families of his victims only on the day of the media conference, eight months later.
The Australian ambassador to Afghanistan, Jon Philp, briefed the families on December 30, 2013 on the outcome of the trial in the Supreme Court of Afghanistan. He told us that Hekmatullah had confessed to all four charges – the murder of three Australian soldiers, the wounding of two, treason and membership of a terrorist organisation (the Taliban). The court concluded that all four crimes were interrelated and imposed the highest penalty – the death sentence. The families were pleased with the death sentence as we considered that his insider attack was a premeditated, cold-blooded, cowardly murder.
The transcript of the trial states that on August 27, 2012, two days before the attack, Hekmatullah went to a nearby grocery shop and was shown a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad on a mobile phone. It included subtitles in Pashto: Not only [have] Infidels/ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] captured our nation, but [they] also [have] contempt for our Prophet Mohammad and burnt the Holy Quran. The cartoon had been published in the French newspaper Charlie Hebdo on November 3, 2011 and was circulating on social media. The burning of the Quran refers to US soldiers who had burnt copies of the Quran at Bagram Air Base in February 2012. Hekmatullah told the court he had taken a copy of this cartoon on his mobile phone and looked at it again that night back at PB Wahab. He said he had then decided to embark on jihad against the infidels and would attack them at a suitable time. “I killed three foreigners as foreigners are infidels and atheists and invaded on our honour and nation,” he told the court. “I don’t have anything else to say.” The transcript included evidence from the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) that Hekmatullah had joined the Afghan National Army under Taliban instructions to perform terrorist acts.
In Afghanistan, for a death sentence to be carried out, the president must sign a warrant for the execution. The president at that time was Hamid Karzai. He was unpredictable and difficult for the ISAF to deal with and I had little confidence that he would sign a warrant for Hekmatullah’s execution. I asked Ambassador Philp whether he could put diplomatic pressure on the Afghanistan Government to carry out the execution. The ambassador said he could not do this because the Australian Government did not support the death penalty. I felt like saying that if Australia does not support the death penalty for enemy combatants during war, we may as well disband the entire ADF, but I didn’t.
In May 2016 it was reported that an Australian fighting with ISIS, Neil Prakash, had been killed in a targeted US air strike in Northern Iraq assisted by Australian intelligence agencies. Then then attorney-general Senator George Brandis said: “We should be gladdened by this news because Prakash was the most dangerous Australian we knew of.” Similarly, Australian intelligence agencies played a key role in a US air strike in Syria that killed Australia’s most notorious terrorist, Khaled Sharrouf, and his two small sons. Peter Dutton, who was then minister for immigration and border protection, said: “No Australian would mourn the loss of Khaled Sharrouf, who was a terrorist.”
I fully supported the comments of these ministers. However, I was struggling to reconcile how senior Australian ministers could on the one hand endorse the killing, by air strikes, of accused terrorists who had not been tried in any court of law in any country, yet on the other be unwilling to ask the Afghan Government to carry out the death sentence of a terrorist who had proudly confessed in a court of law and was then convicted of the ruthless murders of three Australians. There appeared to be double standards at play here.
The three families discussed what to do and decided to await the election of a new president. Mohammad Ashraf Ghani was elected to the role on September 21, 2014. Kelly Walton, partner of Rick Milosevic, contacted the Afghanistan embassy in Canberra and arranged for the three families to meet with the ambassador, Nasir Ahmad Andisha. We met with him for over an hour and asked him if he would kindly forward open letters from each family to President Ghani that requested him to sign a warrant for the execution of Hekmatullah. Each of us needed this closure.
At that time, the Afghanistan Government was trying to negotiate peace with the Taliban and the Taliban was making peace conditional on the release of all Taliban prisoners. Hekmatullah told Kabul-based journalist Jeremy Kelly from prison that he felt no remorse for what he had done and would do it again. He also asked, through Kelly, for the families of the soldiers he had killed to forgive him. If we had done as he had asked, he would have been able to apply for his death sentence to be commuted to life in prison. We certainly did not forgive him. To think this coward who murdered our boys in cold blood may never be executed was intolerable for us.
On January 26, 2015, I had a pleasant surprise: a phone call from President Ashraf Ghani. He said he had received the families’ letters and was very grateful for the sacrifice of our son and all other Australian soldiers who had been killed in his country. He told each of the families that he would personally review the matter of Hekmatullah’s death sentence. On May 8, 2016, six Taliban inmates were hanged in the first set of executions President Ghani had approved. We expected that Hekmatullah would have been among them, but he wasn’t.
The following year a new ambassador, Wahidullah Waissi, arrived in Canberra to represent Afghanistan. I wrote to him requesting a personal meeting to discuss the matter and to ask him to forward an open letter to President Ghani. The ambassador kindly held a half-hour meeting with me alone. I handed him the letter which said that, as the father of Robert Poate, I did not forgive Hekmatullah for murdering my son, respectfully requesting that President Ghani sign a warrant for the execution to enable justice to be done in accordance with Islamic law and the sentence imposed by the Supreme Court of Afghanistan. He undertook to ensure my letter would be delivered to the President.
A month or so later, on June 3, 2017, the three families were contacted by a lieutenant colonel from the ADF to notify us that Defence had received advice from the Australian embassy in Kabul that Hekmatullah would be executed that day, along with 10 other prisoners, at midday our time. I said to the officer, “That is the best news we have had in the last four years.” My wife Janny and I felt an enormous sense of relief, as though a one-tonne weight had been lifted from our shoulders. We smiled for the first time in almost five years. We called a number of veterans still seriously struggling over the deaths of Robbie, Rick and James to let them know Hekmatullah would be hanged at midday; Rick’s partner Kelly, and Suzanne Thomas, the mother of James Martin, did the same. At midday Janny and I cried and hugged each other and called our daughter Nicola at work to let her know that Hekmatullah should now be dead; justice had been done. We informed a wonderful veterans’ charity, Diggers Rest, in Beerwah, Queensland, where a large group of veterans had gathered for a barbecue to celebrate the hanging. They all hugged each other at midday.
However, the good news was short-lived. At 4pm, the same ADF liaison officer called the three families. Our embassy in Kabul had notified Defence that the executions had been delayed. We were given no reason. This sent us spiralling backwards. President Ghani must have signed a warrant, otherwise the Afghan authorities would not have notified the Australian embassy in Kabul that it was scheduled that day. What was the reason for this delay? The families still have not been told.
Six months later I again began ramping up pressure for Hekmatullah’s execution. I was eventually informed by a reliable contact that on August 7, 2016, the Taliban had abducted two civilians, an Australian, Timothy Weeks, and an American, Kevin King, who were both teaching in Kabul. The Taliban threatened that if any more of its prisoners were executed, they would retaliate by killing the Western hostages. A Taliban spokesman also said he wanted its members released from detention centres at Bagram Air Base and Pol-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul. The Taliban released a 13-minute video, which circulated on social media, of the two Western hostages weeping as they urged the US Government to agree to a prisoner exchange that would allow them to go free. I contacted the journalist Jeremy Kelly. He was surprised that our own authorities had not notified us of the abductions. I was not surprised; this had become par for the course in our dealings with Defence.
It seemed to me that the Australian and US embassies in Kabul had likely requested that the executions be delayed so as not to imperil the lives of the two captives. If this was the reason, I felt the families of Hekmatullah’s victims should have been informed officially of this, especially since we had been so active in seeking Hekmatullah’s execution. I decided not to apply any further pressure to have him executed while an Australian was being held hostage [he was later released]; 41 Australian deaths in the Afghanistan war was already 41 too many.
Our son Robbie had once told us that the security situation in Afghanistan would deteriorate after the International Security Assistance Force withdrew, and indeed it has. It has become clear that the Taliban will not stop fighting the US-backed Government of Afghanistan, which it has stated is a puppet of the US.
In September 2019 the then US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, announced that the US was negotiating peace talks directly with the Taliban. The Taliban said any peace deal would be contingent upon the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Afghanistan and the release of its prisoners. Neither the Afghanistan Government nor any of the 50 nations that joined with the US to fight the Taliban were involved in the negotiation process.
On February 29 last year the Trump administration announced it had brokered a prisoner swap deal with the Taliban to release up to 5000 Taliban prisoners held in Afghanistan prisons in return for 1000 Afghan ANA prisoners held by the Taliban, and for the US to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan. Hekmatullah was one of the Taliban prisoners. [It is understood he is under house arrest in Doha, Qatar – a lenient system in which he is free to come and go as long as he reports his movements]. As far as I am concerned, the death penalty imposed on Hekmatullah and the warrant for his execution have not been rescinded and are still active. Karma will deal with him.
The three families will never be able to have complete closure. The sacrifice of 41 Australian lives, including our three boys, 261 wounded and an estimated 500 suicides by veterans have achieved absolutely nothing. Afghanistan is likely to return to the state it was in 2001.
Edited extract from Failures of Command: The death of Private Robert Poate by Hugh Poate (New South, $34.99), out next week.
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