Australia’s most decorated living soldier Ben Roberts-Smith has come out swinging against accusations he murdered unarmed Afghan prisoners, vowing to fight five war crimes charges and insisting he will accept “nothing less than an acquittal”.
The 47-year-old Victoria Cross recipient has broken years of silence to declare his innocence and launch a blistering attack on the circumstances of his arrest, which he claims was staged for maximum publicity and public prejudice in front of his distraught teenage daughters.
“I didn’t bloody murder anyone,” Mr Roberts-Smith declared in an extraordinary two-and-a-half-hour interview with 2GB broadcaster Ben Fordham.
“I’ve never committed a war crime in my military career.
“I’ve never murdered a prisoner and everything I did was inside the laws of armed conflict.”
Mr Roberts-Smith, who was arrested in April and charged with five counts of the war crime of murder, insisted he would fight the allegations when they proceed to trial, which could still be five years away.
Asked what he would say when required to enter a plea, he replied: “I’ll maintain the position that I have always maintained — that I will fight these allegations and the charges in their entirety.”
“The things that have transpired over all these years, all the details that we haven’t been able to talk about, it’s going to get ventilated.
“The only outcome that I can accept is that I’m acquitted of these charges.”
The former SAS corporal faces allegations arising from three separate military operations in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.
The prosecution alleges he machine-gunned Afghan prisoner Mohammed Essa and ordered the execution of another detainee, Ahmadullah, during a raid on a compound known as Whiskey 108 in April 2009.
He is also accused of kicking a handcuffed man, Ali Jan, off a cliff at Darwan in August 2012 before ordering him to be shot.
Two further alleged murders occurred during a mission at Syahchow in October 2012.
Asked directly whether he had ordered a soldier to kill an unarmed prisoner during the Whiskey 108 operation, Mr Roberts-Smith replied: “No.”
“Did you shoot another prisoner with a machine gun?” Fordham pressed.
“Absolutely not,” he responded.
Asked whether he had ever shot prisoners or witnessed other soldiers doing so, Mr Roberts-Smith denied both accusations.
He also rejected allegations he drank beer from the prosthetic leg of an Afghan man killed during the Whiskey 108 raid, although he acknowledged the limb was taken back to the military base and used as a drinking vessel.
“All I’ll say about that was, I had no part in it,” he said.
“I didn’t drink out of it, which is just the truth. I did not and that’s for personal reasons.
“I think that the dark humour that so many emergency service organisations and military organisations rely upon to maintain their sanity will sometimes be misconstrued.”
Mr Roberts-Smith disputed suggestions the men killed during Australian military operations were innocent civilians, insisting the engagements he was involved in were against members of the Taliban.
He accused journalists of portraying the victims as civilians to generate public outrage.
“I’ve got a real problem with that because that has actually, in no way, ever been proven to be a fact,” he said.
His claims stand in stark contrast to the findings of Federal Court Justice Anthony Besanko, who ruled in 2023, on the balance of probabilities, that Mr Roberts-Smith was responsible for four unlawful killings of Afghan detainees.
The former soldier unsuccessfully challenged those findings in the Full Federal Court before the High Court refused to hear a further appeal in September 2025.
Those findings were made under the civil standard of proof, which is lower than the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt.
The 2GB interview, conducted in Queensland on October 8 and released on Thursday, also provided Mr Roberts-Smith’s most detailed account yet of his dramatic arrest at Sydney Airport on April 7.
He revealed he had been travelling with his twin teenage daughters from his marriage to former wife Emma Roberts-Smith, and his current partner Sarah Matulin, on what was supposed to be a surprise shopping trip to Sydney.
The girls were excited to visit a shop they had discovered on social media and Mr Roberts-Smith had used frequent flyer points to book economy flights for the six-hour day trip.
“We gave them a gift card for this thing. Like, ‘hey, this is a present for you. We’re gonna go down to the shop’,” he recalled.
“So they were ecstatic.
“It was all a day trip, no luggage, definitely no passports.”
But as their plane taxied towards the terminal in Sydney, Mr Roberts-Smith noticed a convoy of black SUVs with flashing lights parked on the tarmac.
He initially assumed police were waiting for a VIP.
“(Sarah) looked at me and was concerned and I looked across and said, ‘That’s not going to be for me. I’m not that important’,” he recalled.
Moments later, Australian Federal Police officers boarded the aircraft and approached him in front of about 200 passengers.
Mr Roberts-Smith described the arrest as “farcical”, claiming he had twice offered — in writing — to surrender voluntarily during the preceding six months.
He recalled walking onto the aerobridge and seeing about 10 more police officers waiting.
“I looked at (the AFP officer) and just said, ‘I can’t believe you’ve done this with the kids here’,” he recalled.
“And he looked at me and said, ‘Mate, look, I’m really sorry about that. That wasn’t our call’.”
Mr Roberts-Smith said one of his daughters became hysterical as she realised her father was being taken away.
“I hate it because that’s a memory that will never ever leave them,” he said.
“That’s something that will undoubtedly, no matter what I do to mitigate it, shape their life in some form.”
Mr Roberts-Smith accused authorities of orchestrating a “show arrest” designed to publicly humiliate him and prejudice perceptions of his guilt.
He also questioned whether the decision to arrest him in NSW rather than Queensland was intended to give prosecutors an advantage under different procedural laws.
AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett has since rejected suggestions the location was chosen to secure a legal advantage in NSW.
Mr Roberts-Smith was subsequently taken to Silverwater Prison where he remained until he was released on bail 10 days later.
The April arrest came almost three years after Mr Roberts-Smith’s spectacular defeat in his defamation case against Nine newspapers, a multimillion-dollar legal battle he now admits he was “naive” to launch.
“I accept that I lost the defamation. I’m man enough to sit here and say I didn’t win, but I didn’t win because I didn’t understand that game,” he told Fordham.
“I didn’t lose the defamation because I’m guilty. I can tell you that much.”
Mr Roberts-Smith sued Nine over articles published in 2018 alleging he committed war crimes in Afghanistan, but the legal gamble backfired when Justice Besanko found several of the most serious allegations were substantially true.
Mr Roberts-Smith said he had launched the action because he genuinely believed the allegations were false and could not allow the public accusations to go unchallenged.
Asked whether the defamation action had been one of the “biggest legal mistakes in Australian history”, he questioned what alternative he had.
“I mean, to use the word mistake, what was I going to do?” he said.
“I just thought ‘I know it’s not true, so if I sue these people, they cannot win’.”
Mr Roberts-Smith recalled the proceedings dragging on for years, including a lengthy interruption during the COVID-19 pandemic.
By the time Justice Besanko delivered his findings in June 2023, he was on an overseas holiday and decided not to return solely for the judgment.
Mr Roberts-Smith said he was “gutted” when the judge ruled against him.
“To be completely frank, I actually still thought I was going to win,” he said.
Mr Roberts-Smith also revealed the extraordinary financial cost of the failed litigation to former Seven Media Group chairman Kerry Stokes, estimating that his financial support exceeded $30 million.
“Look, I don’t have an exact figure, but I would say that it would have to be upwards of 30 million,” he said.
“That’s because . . . I didn’t win. I said that before. I accept that, which means a cost order went to Channel Nine.”
He described Mr Stokes and his wife Christine as close friends.
“Kerry and Christine Stokes have supported me from day one,” he said.
“He believed in me and all his position has ever been is ‘you deserve the right to fight it. You deserve a fair go’.
“Just their kindness, he and Christine, has always blown me away.
“I mean, how can you ever repay that?”
Mr Roberts-Smith said his decision to remain silent throughout the defamation case was ultimately detrimental.
“I spent over four years getting absolutely decimated in the press with all kinds of narratives, many of them false, and it most certainly shaped public opinion in a negative way,” he said.
He said the earliest allegations against him had nothing to do with war crimes.
“The first thing I ever heard about rumours circulating about me was actually about, you know, I don’t deserve my awards and I’m a bully,” he said.
He recalled his shock when the accusations became more serious.
“The first time I ever heard about it was an email from a journalist who was asking if I would answer questions about the bullying stuff,” he said.
“And the last line of the email said . . . ‘as a side note, I also would like to talk to you about an allegation that you murdered a child in 2006’.
“And I literally, reading that at the end of an email, I was basically in shock.
“It’s not just the allegation of a war crime, but a war crime where you shot a child. I mean, it doesn’t get any worse than that.”
He said that particular allegation was “the start of all of this”.
“That allegation, funnily enough, was one of the ones that was completely disproven during the defamation . . . It was just completely fabricated and false,” he said.
“The stories that I sued on were not the stories that I ended up having to defend in court.”
As for the bullying allegations, Mr Roberts-Smith revealed his nickname within the SAS had been “Front Dagger”, a reference to his blunt approach to dealing with fellow soldiers.
“Because I don’t stab people in the back. I just give it to them straight in the chest,” he explained.
He admitted confronting colleagues whose performance he considered inadequate but insisted maintaining discipline was critical in an elite military unit.
“I didn’t get it all right all the time,” he said. “But I knew I was giving it everything I had.”
Mr Roberts-Smith — who completed six deployments to Afghanistan over six years — became emotional while recalling the 2010 Battle of Tizak, where he risked his life attacking an enemy machine-gun position to protect fellow soldiers. It was the act that earned him the Victoria Cross.
“I can have a crack and stop this or I can not do anything,” he said.
“And if one of them gets hit, how do I go home and face their families if one of them is to get killed?”
Asked how he felt looking back on the men he fought alongside, Mr Roberts-Smith appeared to choke back tears.
“I’m glad they’re alive,” he said.
After a lengthy pause, he added: “You just think that you’re so lucky to be able to help them.”
He became emotional again when discussing the murders of Australian soldiers Robert Poate, Bryce Duffy and Luke Gavin by rogue Afghan soldier Hekmatullah in 2012.
Mr Roberts-Smith said his SAS squadron had spent a month searching for the killer but failed to capture him.
“That would be a regret of mine from Afghanistan, that we actually were never able to capture him,” he said.
“We put a lot of effort into it, but as I’ve had to say to Robert Poate’s dad, you know, we did our best.”
Mr Roberts-Smith then broke down, pausing and taking a sip of water before saying: “We didn’t get him”.
Looking ahead to his criminal trial, Mr Roberts-Smith said he hoped the ordinary Australians serving on the jury would be able to consider the evidence fairly and understand the military circumstances surrounding the allegations.
“Just having 12 normal people gives me hope, mate,” he said.
When Fordham suggested the trial could be five years away, Mr Roberts-Smith replied: “If I’m lucky, if I’m lucky.”
“So let the process play out before you go judging me, because there’s a long way for this to go, and a lot of things that are going to come out that are going to allow people to have a much more informed perspective of my situation,” he said.
“That’s all I’d ask. That’s all I’m asking. Just some perspective . . . and a bit of bloody fairness, mate. That’s it.”
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