Australian special forces killed Afghan prisoner to make room on plane: US marine

A United States Marine Corps (USMC) helicopter crew chief accused Australian special forces of killing a hog-tied Afghan prisoner after being told he would not fit on the US aircraft coming to pick them up.

The marine told ABC Investigations he was a door gunner providing aerial covering fire for the Australian soldiers of the 2nd Commando Regiment during a night raid in mid-2012. The operation took place north of the HMLA-469 base at Camp Bastion in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province.

It was part of a wider joint Australian special forces-US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) campaign targeting illicit drug operations that were financing the Taliban insurgency. “We had done the drug raid, the Aussies actually did a pretty impressive job, wrangling all the prisoners up,” Josh said.

“We just watched them tackle and hogtie these guys and we knew their hands were tied behind their backs.”

He says the commandos then called up the US aircraft to pick them and about seven prisoners up. He says the Americans only had room on the aircraft for six. “And the pilot said, ‘That’s too many people, we can’t carry that many passengers.’ And you just heard this silence and then we heard a pop. And then they said, ‘OK, we have six prisoners’.

“So it was pretty apparent to everybody involved in that mission that they had just killed a prisoner that we had just watched them catch and hogtie,” he said.

Josh says neither he nor any of his crew spoke about what had just happened.

“We were all being recorded on our comms,” he said.

“All of us were pretty aware of what we just witnessed, and kind of didn’t want to be involved in whatever came next.”

Josh says he later discussed the incident with his crewmates after returning to Camp Bastion.

“This was the first time we saw something we couldn’t morally justify, because we knew somebody was already cuffed up, ready to go, taken prisoner and we just witnessed them kill a prisoner,” he said.

“This isn’t like a heat of the moment call where you’re trying to make a decision. It was a very deliberate decision to break the rules of war.

“I think that was the first thing that happened that didn’t quite sit right with us, where we were like, ‘OK, there’s no excuse, there’s no ambiguity, there’s no going around this one’.”