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Jilly_in_VA

(14,428 posts) Thu Apr 9, 2026, 12:16 PM Thursday

He's Australia's most decorated soldier. Now he's at the centre of a historic war crimes case

One of the most significant moments in Australian military history unfolded without fanfare on a tarmac at Sydney airport, when Ben Roberts-Smith was calmly escorted off a plane and into a waiting police car.

The country's most-decorated living soldier and the most famous of his generation, Roberts-Smith was on Tuesday charged with five counts of the war crime of murder.

It follows a high-profile civil defamation case, which three years ago found that the former Special Air Service (SAS) corporal and Victoria Cross recipient had unlawfully killed several unarmed Afghan detainees.

Roberts-Smith, who left the Australian Defence Force (ADF) in 2013, denies all wrongdoing and says the allegations are "egregious" and driven by spiteful and jealous peers.

His case – now set to be tested to a higher, criminal standard – has become the face of Australia's reckoning over the country's alleged conduct in Afghanistan, which has cast a pall over its much-mythologised military legacy.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czjwp1vjn9lo

This bears echoes of My Lai

4 replies

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Highlight:

He's Australia's most decorated soldier. Now he's at the centre of a historic war crimes case (Original Post) Jilly_in_VA Thursday OP

He is supported by Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart dalton99a Thursday #1

Well, ain't SHE just a beauty! Jilly_in_VA Thursday #2

Don't forget Rupert Murdoch... sop Thursday #3

Yeah, ans we need to send him and his whole family back there! Jilly_in_VA Thursday #4

dalton99a

(94,425 posts)

1. He is supported by Australia's richest person, Gina Rinehart

Reply to Jilly_in_VA (Original post)

Thu Apr 9, 2026, 12:29 PM

Thursday

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gina_Rinehart

...

Georgina Hope Rinehart (née Hancock, born 9 February 1954) is an Australian billionaire mining magnate and businesswoman.[6] She is the executive chairman of Hancock Prospecting, a privately owned mineral exploration and extraction company founded by her father, Lang Hancock. ...

In a 1984 television interview,[75] Rinehart's late father Lang Hancock suggested forcing unemployed indigenous Australians − specifically "the ones that are no good to themselves, who can't accept things, the half-castes" − to collect their welfare cheques from a central location. And when they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem." Rinehart was dragged in controversy in 2022, when she declined to apologize for the comments her father made.[76] Hancock Prospecting subsequently withdrew an A$15 million sponsorship from Netball Australia after Indigenous netballer Donnell Wallam voiced concerns about the deal and the impact of the comments, pertaining to a genocide, by "poisoning" and "sterilising" Indigenous Australians to "solve the problem"; as well as concerns about the company's environmental record.[77][78][79][80][81][82][83][84]

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