Joel Gunter, Hannah O’Grady & Rory Tinman
Two former heads of UK Special Forces suppressed evidence of possible SAS war crimes, a senior former special forces officer told a public inquiry in closed sessions.
The officer, identified in the inquiry as N1466, said he passed what he described as “explosive” evidence suggesting “criminal behaviour” to the then-director special forces in 2011. He also told the inquiry the director who succeeded him in 2012 “clearly knew there was a problem in Afghanistan” and failed to act. “It was not just one director that has known about this,” he said, adding UK Special Forces leadership was “very much suppressing” the allegations.
N1466 confirmed neither director passed the troubling allegations to the Royal Military Police (RMP), despite a legal duty on commanders to notify the RMP of any possibility someone under their command may have committed a serious criminal offence. His testimony is the highest-ranking claim so far that evidence of war crimes was suppressed by senior SAS leadership. The inquiry’s rules mean the names of the former directors he accused cannot be reported in the hearing summaries; at the outset of the inquiry earlier names including Gen Sir Mark Carleton-Smith and Lt Gen Jonathan Page were referenced in proceedings relating to failure to inform the RMP.
The investigation into alleged unlawful killings by SAS troops followed BBC Panorama reporting in 2022 that identified 54 detainees and unarmed men killed by the SAS in suspicious circumstances over a six-month tour. Panorama examined one raid on 7 February 2011 in which nine Afghan men died while only three weapons were claimed to have been recovered; later visits to the scene found bullet holes clustered low on a wall, and weapons experts said the pattern suggested some victims may have been shot while lying down. Families of the dead said the men were civilians with no weapons at home.
N1466 said his concerns began with that February 2011 night raid and gathered as he reviewed SAS reports showing unusually high numbers of killings with too few enemy weapons reported. He also said whistleblowers told him SAS troopers had boasted of killing all “fighting-age” males during operations regardless of threat. Disturbed by what he “strongly suspected was the unlawful killing of innocent people, including children,” he told the inquiry: “I will be clear, we are talking about war crimes.”
In April 2011 N1466 commissioned a review of recent SAS operations from another officer at Special Forces headquarters. The results, he said, looked “startlingly bad” for the SAS. He presented the review to the then-director special forces and said he “indicated quite clearly to him” there was a strong potential of criminal behaviour. According to N1466, the director “absolutely knew what was happening” and “absolutely knew what his responsibilities were” regarding reporting to the military police.
Rather than contacting the RMP, the director ordered an internal “tactics, techniques and procedures” review of the squadron by an SAS officer who visited Afghanistan but spoke only to members of the Regiment. N1466 described this as a “warning shot” to the squadron to tone down violence and accused the director of making “a conscious decision that he is going to suppress this, cover it up and do a little fake exercise to make it look like he’s done something.” The internal report accepted the accounts of those suspected of carrying out the unlawful killings.
Bruce Houlder KC, a former director of service prosecutions, told the BBC the law “imposed a very clear duty” on commanding officers to report suspected crimes, including murder. “If this came to my knowledge I would have asked the service police to investigate the DSF for that failure to report in 2011,” he said.
N1466 eventually reported his evidence to the Royal Military Police in January 2015, nearly four years after first raising concerns and only after the RMP had opened Operation Northmoor, its investigation into the SAS. He told the inquiry he regretted not going sooner to the RMP or urging the director to refer the evidence, saying at the time he viewed doing so as stepping out of line. “When you look back on it, on those people who died unnecessarily from that point onwards – there were two toddlers shot in their bed next to their parents, you know – all that would not… necessarily have come to pass,” he said, referring to a Nimruz province raid in August 2012 first uncovered by the BBC in which two parents were fatally shot while in bed with their infant sons, who were also shot and gravely wounded. That raid occurred after the new director had taken over and, N1466 said, was never reported to the military police.
The director who took over in 2012 told the BBC the allegations made by N1466 were refuted and said he would provide a comprehensive response to each matter in his evidence to the inquiry. He said none of his senior commanders expressed concerns or produced evidence of unlawful killings during his three years in charge and that there was no allegation or evidence he was aware of to refer to the RMP. The former officer who was director special forces in 2011 did not respond to a request for comment.
