British ministers have announced a statutory judge-led inquiry into allegations that crack soldiers from the UK’s Special Air Service were involved in up to 54 killings of civilians in Afghanistan between 2010 and 2013.
The probe into claims of summary executions carried out by members of the SAS special forces unit comes after years of reports about British troops allegedly killing civilians in cold blood.
In a statement to the British House of Commons, Minister for Defense People Andrew Murrison said the Ministry of Defense would concede to longstanding demands for an “independent statutory inquiry” after years of dismissing the idea, The Guardian reported on Thursday.
The investigation will cover the period from mid-2010 to mid-2013.
Murrison added that Lord Justice Haddon-Cave would head the inquiry and that work would start “in earnest in 2023.”
Haddon-Cave will stand down from his job as senior presiding judge for England and Wales to focus on the task, according to The Guardian.
The announcement follows allegations that Afghans were killed in suspicious circumstances by one SAS unit in Helmand province, and that their deaths amounted to war crimes.
British Shadow Defense Secretary John Healey said: “This special inquiry is welcome and must succeed. It is essential to protect the reputation of our British special forces, guarantee the integrity of military investigations, and secure justice for any of those affected.”
According to a high court case brought by law firm Leigh Day on behalf Afghan national, Saifullah, the man’s father, two brothers, and a cousin were killed during an SAS raid on a compound in southern Afghanistan in February 2011.
Court evidence indicated that Afghan men detained on SAS night raids were often separated from their families and shot dead after they were said to have unexpectedly produced a hand grenade or an AK-47 rifle.
Saifullah’s legal team sought a judicial review, arguing that the MoD did not properly investigate allegations of unlawful activity and that Britain had breached its human rights obligations by not properly examining them.
Internal correspondence revealed that an SAS sergeant-major described the episode as “the latest massacre” in an email sent the following morning, after the report on a mission that led to the deaths of Saifullah’s family members was filed.
Concerns about SAS activity in Afghanistan have been circling around the MoD for years, but criminal investigations were closed three years ago without any prosecutions being brought.
In 2014, military police launched Operation Northmoor, an investigation into allegations of more than 600 offenses by British forces in Afghanistan, including the alleged killing of civilians by the SAS. It was wound down in 2017 and closed in 2019, and the MoD said no evidence of criminality was found.
In court proceedings in July relating to Saifullah’s case, Edward Craven, a lawyer representing the claimants, said the case “concerns alleged state wrongdoings of the most serious kind” and that there was “a pattern of extrajudicial killings, allegations of a cover-up, and allegations of a failure to properly investigate them.”
The court heard that a military police officer wrote that “political pressure” was applied in 2016 to narrow the focus of a military police investigation into allegations of summary killings by SAS soldiers to limit their inquiries to “tactical-level command responsibility.”
Lawyers said the inquiry’s task would not be to determine individuals’ criminal or civil liability, but instead to focus on whether Afghans were killed unlawfully and if there was a credible pattern of unlawful killings by the SAS. It may recommend that further criminal or civil investigations are necessary.
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