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UK’s elite Special Air Service (SAS) killed scores of Afghan civilians unlawfully between 2010 and 2013, Britain’s minister for veterans Johnny Mercer has told an inquiry.
According to a report in The Guardian, Mercer, himself an army veteran whose last tour in Afghanistan was in 2010, said he believed the SAS carried out these killings and had also raised it after assuming ministership with the then defence secretary Ben Wallace in 2019.
Mercer, per the report in The Guardian, also said that he was shot down by Wallace. The latter greenlighted a probe later, but Mercer said he felt “being gamed”.
Himself an army veteran, Mercer said the SAS actions slowly dawned upon him during and after his last Afghanistan tour in 2010 since he was also alerted by colleagues in the matter after he became Member of Parliament in 2017.
“I don’t want to believe it, but at every stage I have tried to find something to disprove these allegations, but I have been unable to,” Mercer told the inquiry Tuesday, an effective confirmation of the killings, The Guardian said.
Mercer became minister for veterans’ affairs first in 2019 and remained in office up until 2021 before assuming the charge again in July 2022.
According to the report in The Guardian, the minister said he found unconvincing the explanations given by the Ministry of Defence officials.
Mercer also revealed how the SAS had stonewalled giving evidence. An investigator appointed by the Royal Military Police had asked for the body cam footage of 10 random SAS officers, a request that was snubbed with claims that no such footage existed for any operation.
Impact Shorts
View AllThe UK minister also told the inquiry committee that he had told Wallace that he did not find “plausible” that no camera footage existed since after a mission in 2006 went sideways, full-motion video was a “go/no go” requirement for SAS operations. Moreover, body cam footages were backed up.
Mercer made explosive claims, saying that while in 2017 he was rallying to fight a spate of false allegations of wrongdoing by the army in Iraq, he was told by a former fellow soldier that the latter was asked to carry a weapon to be planted as evidence justifying killings in a night raid in the Helmand province of Afghanistan.
Mercer, however, did not reveal the identity of his sources.
“The simple reality at this stage is I’m not prepared to burn them – not when, in my judgment, you are already speaking to people who have far greater knowledge of what was going on,” The Guardian quoted Mercer as having told the inquiry.
Judge Charles Haddon-Cave, who chaired the inquiry, asked Mercer to disclose the names since the inquiry was independent of the government and was adept at handling sensitive information.
The inquiry was instituted by Wallace, but three years too late after Mercer said he had informed him.
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