SAS had golden pass to get away with murder, inquiry told

A former senior British special forces officer has stated in a public inquiry into alleged war crimes in Afghanistan that the Special Air Service (SAS) had a “murder pass, to get away with it.” This allegation was released on Wednesday by the Afghan Inquiry team as part of a summary of materials from seven closed-door hearings involving members of the British special forces.

The officer, a former operations staff officer for the Special Boat Service (SBS), the UK’s naval special forces, was among a number of senior officers in 2011 who raised concerns that the SAS appeared to be carrying out executions and covering them up. At the time, the officer wrote in an email that the SAS and murder were “frequent bedfellows,” and called the regiment’s official accounts of operational killings “unbelievable.”

In the closed-door hearing, when asked by the inquiry team if he stood by his view that the SAS’s actions amounted to murder, the officer replied: “Absolutely, yes.” When pressed by the inquiry lawyer on why he did not escalate his concerns further in 2011, he expressed regret over his inaction at the time. He agreed that there was a “massive leadership failure” within the British special forces.

The former SBS operations staff officer was one of several senior Royal Navy special forces officers who gave closed-door testimony to the inquiry in 2024. The inquiry is examining British special forces night raids between 2010 and 2013, following years of reporting by the BBC’s Panorama program on alleged murders and cover-ups by the SAS.

Only the inquiry team and representatives from the Ministry of Defence were allowed to attend the closed-door hearings. Members of the public, the media, and lawyers for the victims’ families were barred. The material released on Wednesday summarized the testimony from these hearings. The documents, totaling hundreds of pages, depicted the SAS's arrival in Afghanistan in 2009 and how they took over the hunt for the Taliban from the SBS.

Senior SBS officers told the inquiry that they were deeply concerned that the SAS were being driven by kill counts—the number of deaths achieved in each operation—after undergoing aggressive, high-intensity operations in Iraq. Another senior SBS officer who testified was asked if he stood by his 2011 concerns about extrajudicial killings by the SAS. He said: “I believed then, and I believe now, that in at least some operations, [the SAS] were carrying out murder.”

A junior SBS officer, who also gave closed-door testimony to the inquiry, described a conversation in which an SAS member who had just returned from Afghanistan told him that someone had been smothered with a pillow and then shot with a handgun. “I think what shocked me most was not the execution of potential Taliban members, which is of course wrong and illegal, but the age and the method, and the detail such as the pillow,” the junior officer said.

He clarified that, based on the conversation he recounted, some of the people killed by the SAS were children. When asked by the inquiry lawyer if he meant that some of those killed could have been as young as 16, he replied: “Or younger, 100%.” The junior officer told the inquiry that he feared for his safety if his name was linked to testimony regarding alleged murders of civilians by the SAS.

These SBS officers were among a small group of people who privately questioned the veracity of SAS operational reports from Afghanistan in 2011. A senior officer who was based at the SBS headquarters in Poole at the time wrote in an email to a senior colleague: “If we don’t believe these, then nobody else will, and we will get dragged down when the next WikiLeaks happens.”

The two senior officers were able to decipher the language in the regiment’s reports because they had served in SBS operational units before the SAS arrived in Afghanistan, when the naval force was forced into a back seat doing counter-narcotics operations instead of hunting the Taliban. They not only believed that the SAS may have committed murder but also described what they believed was a cover-up taking place in Afghanistan in emails. The second officer told the inquiry chair: “Basically, there seemed to be a ‘shut up and don’t question’ culture.”

At the time, logistics staff in Afghanistan were skeptical of the SAS’s operational accounts, finding them implausible. However, one senior SBS officer wrote that their concerns were not taken seriously and were instead met with rebuke, “to ensure staff were supporting the guys on the ground.” He told the inquiry that in the eyes of the special forces commander in Afghanistan, the SAS could do no wrong, and called the regiment’s lack of accountability “appalling.”

The documents released on Wednesday also revealed new details of an explosive meeting in Afghanistan in February 2011, in which Afghan special forces working with the SAS angrily withdrew their support. The meeting followed growing disagreements between the SAS and the Afghan special forces over what the Afghans believed to be unlawful killings by SAS members.

One Afghan officer who attended the meeting was reportedly so angry that he drew his pistol. In a recently released email, an SBS officer described the meeting: “I’ve never been in such a hostile meeting before – real shouting, arms waving, and at one stage I was staring down the barrel of a 9mm – all very unpleasant.”

Following the intervention of senior British special forces members, the Afghan forces agreed to continue working with the SAS. But this would not be the last time they withdrew their support in protest. “It was all very disruptive,” the SBS officer concluded in his email.