SAS troops accused of war crimes not referred to police over morale fears, inquiry hears

A former chief of staff of UK Special Forces has told a public inquiry he believed war crimes allegations against the SAS were not referred to military police out of concern an investigation could disrupt operations and negatively affect morale.

The officer, the second highest ranking in special forces at the time, said another factor in the decision was that evidence had in part come via a rival special forces regiment.

The decision meant that military police did not learn for years of special forces concerns that the SAS was carrying out extra-judicial killings and submitting falsified reports.

The testimony came from closed-door evidence to the Independent Inquiry relating to Afghanistan.

The inquiry is investigating allegations that the SAS committed war crimes on operations between 2010 and 2013, including the killing of children and civilians. The latest batch of testimony was heard in 2024 but only released in summarised form by the inquiry on Friday.

Despite the severity of the allegations, the then-director of UK Special Forces decided in 2011 not to refer them to the Royal Military Police, instead commissioning an internal review into the tactics being used by the SAS.

The decision was controversial because every commanding officer in the British military has a legal obligation to alert military police if they become aware that someone under their command may have committed a war crime.

The internal review was led by a UKSF officer close to the SAS unit responsible for the raids under scrutiny, and signed off by the commanding officer of the unit. It took just a week and found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing.

The former chief of staff, known at the inquiry only as N2252, said he believed the director had felt a military police investigation would take too long to deliver results, and that an internal review "could be done quickly" and would "send a signal" to those responsible for the troubling operations.

Summaries of closed evidence released by the inquiry over the past year have highlighted serious concerns among several senior officers at headquarters in the spring of 2011 that members of the SAS could have repeatedly strayed beyond the bounds of the law.

The concerns arose from a combination of whistleblower testimony and troubling reports coming back from Afghanistan, which showed a significant number of operations on which someone already detained and handcuffed had subsequently been shot dead by the SAS, as well as operations on which there were more people killed than weapons claimed to have been found at the scene.

The imbalanced ratio of dead to weapons recovered can be an indication that people were killed who did not pose an immediate threat to the lives of the soldiers or others, which is necessary for the use of lethal force in self-defence.

UKSF headquarters was also made aware of a complaint from a high-profile international organisation monitoring the conflict on the ground relating to alleged extrajudicial killings by the SAS, and complaints from Afghan special forces who were so infuriated by what they believed was the murder of civilians that they refused on several occasions to fight alongside the SAS.

N2252 told the inquiry that alerting the Royal Military Police to these concerns in 2011 would have interfered with the high tempo of SAS operations, at a time when the regiment was tasked with going after Taliban operatives and bombmakers responsible for laying IEDs.

"You would take the sub-unit out, you would conduct the investigation and they would be thinking about the investigation and not on planning the next operation," he said.

N2252 also said that applying that kind of scrutiny to the SAS's operations could have undermined trust within UK Special Forces, telling the inquiry that if headquarters had questioned the accounts given by troops "the message that will have gone back to them is 'we don't believe you'."

Another witness, a senior officer at headquarters known at the inquiry as N1788, criticised the way the SAS was carrying out operations, testifying that it "should have been obvious" to commanding officers in Afghanistan that things were going wrong.

N1788 told the inquiry that while he was aware of tactical errors, there was "never any mention to me of complaints or rumours that members of UKSF were performing extra-judicial killings or war crimes, planting weapons, or falsifying records".

A lawyer for the inquiry put it to N1788 that his claim was directly contradicted both by testimony from his superior officer at special forces headquarters – who testified previously that the two had discussed the possibility of extrajudicial killings and planted weapons – and by testimony from another senior officer in Afghanistan, who said N1788 asked him during a phone conversation if "the 'm-word' was relevant", referring to murder.

A third witness, a UKSF officer based in Afghanistan and ciphered as N889, told the inquiry he may have been too quick to believe the SAS's operational reports. "I totally accept, you know, all these years later looking back that perhaps one should have taken a slight harder view," he said. "I maybe naively read this stuff, believed it and carried on".

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