The newspapers allege as part of their defence that Roberts-Smith directed a “rookie” soldier dubbed Person 4 to kill an unarmed Afghan prisoner in 2009. The media outlets allege Person 5 officially ordered that killing.
Person 5 told the court he met Roberts-Smith in 2002 when he joined the SAS,and the men first served in a patrol together in Afghanistan in 2009 when he was patrol commander and Roberts-Smith was his second-in-charge.
Person 5,whose identity cannot be revealed for national security reasons,described his relationship with Roberts-Smith as “very good” and said it was an “easy choice” to make him his 2IC in 2009 because “I had seen how capable he was”.
A serving SAS soldier dubbed Person 18told the court last month that he overheard Person 5 tell Roberts-Smith after a 2009 mission to a compound in Afghanistan codenamed Whiskey 108 that they had “blooded the rookie”. Person 18 said it was a “running joke” that Person 4 was the “rookie”.
But Person 5 told the court on Tuesday that he first heard the term “blooding the rookie” in the media. He had never used the term,he said. He said the term blooding had been used for centuries by armies to refer to a new member getting their first “kill” in battle. He said he had never killed a prisoner,nor ordered a subordinate to carry out such a killing.
Person 5 told the court that the rules of engagement under which the SAS operated in Afghanistan allowed soldiers to use lethal force in self-defence. Enemy combatants who surrendered to Australian troops were not killed but “PUCed”,he said,meaning they were detained and became persons under the control of the SAS.
The court has previously heard evidence from another serving SAS soldier,Person 41,that Roberts-Smith,then second-in-charge to Person 5,told Person 4 during the 2009 mission to shoot a captive Afghan man who had been discovered in a tunnel at Whiskey 108.