The court has heard evidence that camera-equipped drones,known as Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance devices,were used to film some missions from the air. Person 5 told Mr Roberts-Smith on the day of the so-called Whiskey 108 mission that the drone “may have recorded” him,Person 18 said.
Mr Roberts-Smith replied to Person 5 that “we need to find out if the ISR was still above us”,Person 18 said,and Person 5 sent a message on a troop internal chat asking where the drone was and if it was recording.
Defence personnel replied that the drone had been “pushed into another threat area” in a compound dubbed Whiskey 108,Person 18 said.
A former SAS soldier known as Person 19has previously given evidence that Mr Roberts-Smith said during a training exercise in Australia that drones,“which can see what’s going on”,should be pushed off “to observe another area” during a “sensitive site exploitation”.
Person 19 said that Mr Roberts-Smith went on to say:“That’s when any people that we suspected of being enemy combatants,we’d take them into a room and shoot the c---s.”
Person 18 told the court on Friday that he found and searched the bodies of three Afghan men during the Whiskey 108 mission. He said he found one body,an Afghan man dressed in white,inside the compound “roughly near” a tunnel entrance. Person 18 told the court that he had seen two to three SAS soldiers earlier that day around an Afghan man in white near the tunnel,and the man had plastic flexicuffs on his wrists.
The court has previously heard evidence from another serving SAS soldier that Mr Roberts-Smith told a soldier dubbed Person 4 to shoot a captive Afghan man who had been discovered in the tunnel at Whiskey 108.