The only plausible explanation why three Afghan villagers and two former elite soldiers all implicated Ben Roberts-Smith in the alleged murder of a prisoner was that all were telling the truth, a court has heard in the final days of his defamation case
who was not connected to the Taliban, and that a “big soldier” kicked him off a cliff.
“There is no explanation for how it is that the evidence of those two completely unconnected groups of witnesses could possibly correspond to the extent it does.”Owens said “a second powerful source of corroboration for Person 4 is found in the evidence of Person 56”. The mastheads called seven witnesses in support of the allegation that men were found inside the tunnel and that Roberts-Smith executed one of them after directing a “rookie” soldier, dubbed Person 4, to kill the other man as a form of “blooding” or initiation.
Owens submitted that if Justice Anthony Besanko accepted the newspapers’ witnesses, who told the court that up to three men were taken from the tunnel, “it follows almost inevitably that your Honour would disbelieve Mr Roberts-Smith’s entire case about Whiskey 108”.who told the court Owens told Besanko on Monday that the court faces “a stark choice between effectively irreconcilable accounts” of alleged events in Afghanistan. While the newspapers bore the onus of establishing alleged war crimes occurred on the balance of probabilities, Owens said Besanko was effectively being asked to decide “who is lying” in the case.
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