Emails reveal officers’ fears of rogue SAS execution squad

The British Defence Secretary has been ordered by a judge to explain why evidence that a rogue SAS unit “executed’’ civilians was withheld.

British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. Picture: Getty Images

British Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has been ordered by a judge to explain why evidence that a rogue Special Air Service unit “executed” innocent civilians was withheld from a High Court case in which the special forces regiment is accused of covering up war crimes.

The evidence is contained in internal emails between senior special forces officers in which serious concerns are expressed about the killings of 33 people in 11 night raids in just three months by an SAS unit suspected of going on a murder spree in Afghanistan in 2011.

These included 10 near-identical incidents in which men were shot in their homes after surrendering and being detained by the SAS.

In each case the SAS unit claimed the men were killed after they grabbed a weapon, but even its own special forces commanders expressed serious doubts about the plausibility of so many similar incidents.

In one email, one of the country’s highest-ranking special forces officers described the allegations he had received as “explosive” and “disturbing”.

He said they suggested “a deliberate policy among the current (SAS unit name redacted) Sqn to engage and kill fighting-aged males on target even when they did not pose a threat”. He therefore believed that those SAS troops involved may be guilty of “criminal behaviour”.

The emails show that after being sent a report from one such mission, an SAS soldier wrote: “Is this about … latest massacre!”

A judge would later question the “collective amnesia” of the more than 40 SAS soldiers and servicemen involved in that operation who claimed they could not recall the raid when interviewed by the Royal Military Police.

The documents were disclosed on the eve of the second hearing of a High Court case being brought by an Afghan man in his late twenties, Saifullah Yar, who is seeking an independent investigation into the deaths of four of his family, shot by the SAS on February 16, 2011.

The government’s lawyers had argued in a previous hearing that the RMP had not been able to investigate the killings at the time because they did not receive a complaint about any wrongdoing until almost three years later.

However, the British government already had in its possession a cache of documents that showed forceful complaints were made just days after the mission — information that should have been communicated to the earlier hearing.

The government’s lawyers were then forced to disclose the documents that revealed Afghan troops working with the SAS unit in the raid and the then governor of Helmand province both protested to British commanders that Saifullah’s innocent relatives had been captured and then killed.

In the second hearing last month, Mr Justice Swift suggested that the government should now replead its case and asked for a full witness statement from the Defence Secretary explaining how information so crucial to the case had been withheld.

“What has happened in this litigation is out of the ordinary,” the judge told the hearing.

At the weekend Lord Ken MacDonald, former director of public prosecutions and one of Britain’s leading criminal lawyers, said: “The way a nation wages war tells you all you need to know about its attachment to the rule of law.

“It is bad enough if British soldiers were systematically murdering civilians in Afghanistan — making themselves liable to criminal proceedings in the UK.

“But this is compounded if their superior officers and government officials deliberately failed to investigate suspected war crimes, and then tried to conceal evidence that they had occurred from the courts.”

The documents show how the incident involving Saifullah’s family had led the special forces commanders to look into a wider pattern of killings by the SAS unit that was carrying out night raids on Afghan homes to capture suspected Taliban insurgents.

The 10 deaths happened between January 8 and April 2, 2011. In the same period there were a further five operations where the number of people killed by the SAS unit vastly exceeded the number of weapons found on their bodies.

The UK Ministry of Defence said: “This is not new evidence, and this historical case has already been independently investigated by the RMP … These documents were considered as part of the independent investigations, which concluded there was insufficient evidence to refer the case for prosecution.”

THE SUNDAY TIMES