MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Until a few years ago, Ben Roberts-Smith was one of Australia's most celebrated war heroes. Now he will stand trial for alleged war crimes committed in Afghanistan. As Kristina Kukolja reports from Melbourne, he remains in custody after his legal team declined to request bail.
KRISTINA KUKOLJA, BYLINE: A yearslong investigation led to the arrest of Ben Roberts-Smith at Sydney airport on Tuesday. The 47-year-old former special forces soldier is charged with five counts of murder as a war crime over his alleged role in the killing of Afghan civilians in Uruzgan Province between 2009 and 2012. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett told reporters, it's alleged...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KRISSY BARRETT: The victims were detained, unarmed and were under the control of ADF members when they were killed.
KUKOLJA: The ADF is the Australian Defense Force. An ongoing investigation into the conduct of its troops in the war in Afghanistan has already seen one other soldier charged. That's after a military inquiry found there was credible information that elite Australian forces were involved in the allegedly unlawful killing of 39 Afghan prisoners - farmers and civilians. Ross Barnett, one of these special investigators working with federal police, says it's a challenging investigation, especially since the alleged war crimes were committed years ago.
ROSS BARNETT: We don't have access to the crime scenes. We don't have photographs, site plans, measurements, the recovery of projectiles, blood spatter analysis, all of those things we would normally get at a crime scene.
KUKOLJA: The first war crimes allegations against Ben Roberts-Smith appeared in media reports in 2018, after some of his fellow soldiers in Afghanistan spoke to journalists.
GIDEON BOAS: In my experience of prosecuting war crimes, it's essential to have insider evidence.
KUKOLJA: That's Gideon Boas, a senior legal adviser to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the trial of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Ben Roberts-Smith fought back, launching a defamation case against the media company that first reported the accusations against him.
BOAS: The defamation trial, which occurred a few years ago, saw a number of former defense force servicemen who had served with Roberts-Smith give evidence about his alleged crimes.
KUKOLJA: That civil trial found that Ben Roberts-Smith likely committed war crimes in Afghanistan. He maintains his innocence, and the upcoming trial will test the new charges against him to a higher criminal standard. Gideon Boas says the prosecution of Roberts-Smith is significant.
BOAS: He's been touted as a war hero for many years, and he's somebody who embodies, really, the image of the Australian soldier.
KUKOLJA: If convicted, that Australian soldier could be sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison. For NPR News, I'm Kristina Kukolja in Melbourne.
(SOUNDBITE OF TENDAI SONG, "TIME IN OUR LIVES") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.