Special Forces chiefs suppressed evidence of SAS war crimes, investigation finds

Two former heads of all UK Special Forces suppressed evidence of possible SAS war crimes, a former senior officer has told a public inquiry in closed-door evidence sessions.

The officer, who was among the highest-ranking in the special forces, said he had passed what he called “explosive” evidence suggesting “criminal behavior” to the then-director of the special forces in 2011.

The officer also told the inquiry that the subsequent special forces director, who took over in 2012, “clearly knew there was a problem in Afghanistan” and failed to act.

“It was not just one director who knew about this,” he said in his statement, adding that the UK Special Forces leadership was “largely suppressing” the allegations.

The officer, known to the investigation as code N1466, confirmed that none of the special forces chiefs had passed on any of the worrying allegations to the Royal Military Police (RMP), despite British law requiring commanders to inform the RMP of any possibility that someone under their command may have committed a serious crime.

N1466’s testimony is significant because he is the highest-ranking former special forces officer to allege that those who ran the SAS suppressed evidence of war crimes.

His testimony comes from summaries of closed-door hearings held by the Afghanistan-related Independent Inquiry, which is examining allegations of special forces war crimes.

Rules of the investigation mean the names of the former directors accused by the official cannot be revealed.

The Afghan investigation was launched following allegations of unlawful killings by the SAS, BBC Panorama reported in 2022.

The program revealed that 54 detainees and unarmed men had been killed by the SAS in suspicious circumstances in just one six-month tour.

The program also found evidence that the head of the special forces in 2012, General Sir Mark Carleton-Smith, had failed to report war crimes.

At the start of the investigation, both General Carleton-Smith and Lieutenant General Jonathan Page, the former head of the special forces, were named in the proceedings in relation to claims that they had failed to inform the RMP of the allegations.

N1466 told the inquiry he had first become concerned in February 2011, after noticing that SAS reports from Afghanistan showed the regiment was killing people in suspicious circumstances and in unusually high numbers, with too few enemy weapons recovered from some operations to justify the death toll.

N1466 said his suspicions began with a nighttime raid in which nine Afghan men were killed and it was claimed that only three weapons had been discovered. BBC Panorama visited the site of that raid years later, in 2022, and found bullet holes inside the room where the men grouped near the floor died.

Gun experts told Panorama that the pattern suggested the victims had been shot while lying down, and that the shooting described by the SAS in its report was unlikely. The family said they were civilians and had no weapons in their home.

N1466 also told the inquiry that he had been made aware of testimony from a complainant that SAS soldiers had been heard boasting during a training course that they had killed all men of “fighting age” during operations, regardless of whether they posed a threat or not.

Along with the operational reports, N1466 became “deeply concerned by what he strongly suspected was the unlawful killing of innocent people, including children,” he testified.

“Let me be clear: we are talking about war crimes,” he said.

In response, in April 2011, N1466 tasked another special forces headquarters officer with a review of recent SAS operations. The results looked “shockingly bad” for the SAS, he told the inquiry.

The review was part of evidence he presented to the then-special forces director in 2011. He said it “indicated to him quite clearly” that “there was a strong potential for criminal behavior.”

N1466 testified that the director “absolutely knew what was happening” in Afghanistan regarding the alleged war crimes, and “absolutely knew what his responsibilities were” in reporting the allegations to military police.

The director did not contact the police, instead ordering an internal review of the SAS squad’s tactics, a move N1466 described as a “warning shot” to the squad to diffuse the violence.

The director had made “a conscious decision to suppress this, cover it up and do a little fake exercise to make it look like he’s done something,” N1466 said.

The subsequent review of “tactics, techniques and procedures” was carried out by an SAS officer, who visited Afghanistan but only spoke to other members of the Regiment. The resulting report fully accepted the suspects’ accounts of carrying out the unlawful killings.

Bruce Houlder KC, who as the service’s former director of prosecutions was responsible for charging and prosecuting those serving in the armed forces, told the BBC that the law “imposed a very clear duty” on commanding officers to report suspected crimes, “including murder, which we are talking about here.”

“If this had come to my attention, I would have asked the police to investigate the DSF for failing to report in 2011,” he said.

N1466 finally reported the evidence directly to the Royal Military Police in January 2015, almost four years after first raising concerns and only after the RMP had begun Operation Northmoor, an investigation into the SAS.

He told the inquiry that it was “a matter of great regret” that he had not gone to the RMP sooner, nor had he urged the headteacher to refer the evidence to the RMP, a move he said he regarded at the time as going out of line.

“When you look back at those people who died unnecessarily from that point on (there were two little boys shot in their bed next to their parents, you know), all of that wouldn’t…necessarily have happened,” he said.

He was referring to an SAS raid in Nimruz province in August 2012, first discovered by the BBC, in which two young parents were shot dead while in bed with their young children, who were also shot and seriously injured.

The raid, which took place after the new special forces director took command, was never reported to military police.

The director who took over in 2012 told the BBC that the allegations made by N1466 were refuted and that he would provide a comprehensive response to each of these issues in his testimony to the inquiry in due course.

He said none of his senior commanders expressed any concerns or presented any evidence of unlawful killings at any stage of his three years in charge and there was no allegation or evidence of which he was aware to refer to the RMP.

The former officer who was special forces director in 2011 did not respond to a request for comment.