A top military investigator charged with probing alleged war crimes has defended the speed of investigations after Ben Roberts-Smith’s arrest, saying the lack of a crime scene makes evidence gathering “incredibly complex”.
Mr Roberts-Smith, one of the country’s most decorated soldiers, was arrested on Tuesday after a five-year investigation into claims he murdered unarmed detainees in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2012.
He has always denied the claims.
Ross Barnett, director of investigations at the Office of the Special Investigator, told a press conference gathering evidence had been heavily hampered due to a lack of access to Afghanistan.
“Unlike a conventional investigation that’s conducted in Australia, the OSI has been tasked with investigating literally dozens of murders, alleged to have been committed in the middle of a war zone, in a country 9000 kilometres from Australia that we can no longer access,” Mr Barnett said.
“So the challenge for investigators is … when can’t go to the country, we don’t have access to the crime scene.
“So we don’t have photographs, site plans, measurements, the recovery of projectiles, blood spatter analysis – all of the things that we would normally get at a crime scene.”
He went on to say that investigators also do not have access to bodies.
“There’s no post-mortem, therefore, there’s no official cause of death,” he said.
“There’s no recovery of projectiles to link to weapons that might have been carried by members of the (Australian Defence Force).
“So there are a lot of practical challenges that confront the investigators who are doing all of these jobs.”
Mr Barnett said investigations often started “with one or two photographs of the battlefield and some contemporary ADF reporting and potentially, some third party eyewitness testimony about what’s alleged to have occurred”.
“So it’s a very challenging starting point for all of these investigations,” he said.
More to come
