SAS shot three Afghan farmers
Whistleblowers tell the Afghanistan war crimes inquiry that SAS troops threw shackled prisoners off forklifts for sport, and shot three farmers dead.
British soldiers shot dead three Afghan farmers with their hands raised, then paid their mother £3,634 to “calm local atmospherics,” the Afghanistan war crimes inquiry heard this week.
Bebe Hazrata’s sons walked into the courtyard of their own home in the village of Rahim, Helmand, in 2012, hands held high, when soldiers on the roof opened fire. Troops then entered the compound and fired again on the bodies, according to her account. The UK government’s payment to her was not compensation. It was described, in the flat language of the file, as an “assistance payment.”
Afghanistan war crimes inquiry hears of forklift “fun”
Two whistleblowers gave evidence to the inquiry, chaired by Lord Justice Sir Charles Haddon-Cave, on 14 July. Monica Grenfell, a former SAS mess hand, told the panel a soldier had described putting Afghan prisoners on a forklift, raising it, then braking hard “so that they fell off.” The abuse happened in both Iraq and Afghanistan, she said, and was not the work of one man acting alone: “It was something they did for fun.”
Grenfell described the SAS training camp in Hertfordshire as “coarse and feral,” with racial language she said she had never encountered anywhere else in her working life.
Christopher Green, a former Grenadier Guards captain who served in Afghanistan in 2012, told the inquiry he was branded a “Taliban-loving apologist” for questioning the SAS account of the Rahim killings. His own unit’s intelligence team found nothing to suggest the three brothers were Taliban commanders, he said, contradicting the SAS version of events. When Green asked to see the “gun tapes,” helmet footage that could have settled the dispute, he was refused. He called that refusal “an admission of guilt.”
Green told the inquiry SAS soldiers drank alcohol banned to other ranks and ignored normal discipline: a “culture of exceptionalism” in which, in his words, “the normal rules did not apply to them.”
No charges brought
The Rahim case was examined under Operation Northmoor, a £10m Royal Military Police probe launched in 2014, and later under Operation Cestro, which referred three soldiers to the Service Prosecuting Authority. None was prosecuted. Lawyers for the inquiry have identified at least 80 suspicious deaths across more than 30 detention operations between 2010 and 2013. The SAS maintains the Rahim men were armed and had drawn weapons; that dispute remains unresolved, and Tuesday’s testimony was evidence, not a verdict.
The Ministry of Defence said it was “fully committed to supporting the independent inquiry” and “hugely grateful” to those who had given evidence, while remaining “committed to providing the support that our special forces deserve.”
Bebe Hazrata is still owed an explanation. She got £3,634.
