Australian War Hero Found Guilty of Murdering Unarmed Afghan Civilians

Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia's most decorated living war veteran, has been found to have unlawfully killed prisoners and committed other war crimes in Afghanistan by a federal court judge. The judge dismissed Roberts-Smith's claims of defamation by media and found that the articles published in 2018 were substantially true about a number of war crimes committed by him. The accusations included killing a prisoner who had a prosthetic leg, kicking an unarmed, handcuffed farmer off a cliff into a riverbed where he directed a soldier under his command to shoot the farmer dead, and pressuring a "newly deployed and inexperienced" soldier to kill an elderly, unarmed Afghan to "blood the rookie."