A former Australian SAS soldier has been charged with murder, following an research into alleged strugglefare crimes in Afghanistan.
Oliver Schulz, 41, is the primary Australian serviceman or veteran to be charged with a strugglefare crime beneathneath Australian regulation.The offence consists of a most sentence of existence in jail. He become arrested on Monday in New South Wales (NSW) and has been remanded in custody. He will seem in a Sydney courtroom docket at a later date.
The Australia Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) says Mr Schulz is the character called Soldier C in a 2020 ABC Four Corners documentary exposing alleged strugglefare crimes. Footage confirmed Soldier C taking pictures an Afghan guy in a wheat discipline in Uruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan in 2012.
The research become executed through the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI), the frame installation to research alleged strugglefare crimes following a four-12 months inquiry led through an Army Reserve main widespread and NSW Supreme Court choose Paul Brereton.
The Brereton Report – launched in 2020 – discovered there become “credible evidence” that Australian elite squaddies unlawfully killed 39 humans at some point of the Afghan strugglefare.
It stated 19 modern-day or ex-unique forces squaddies must be investigated through police over killings of “prisoners, farmers or civilians” from 2009 to 2013. This is assumed to be the primary arrest connected to that inquiry. At the time, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) blamed crimes on an unchecked “warrior culture” amongst a few squaddies.
Mr Schulz`s case must set an “essential precedent” for the West and its allies on the way to take care of suspected wrongdoing withinside the military, stated Tim McCormack, a regulation professor on the University of Tasmania and unique adviser on strugglefare crimes to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
“We’ve by no means had a scenario withinside the beyond in which a member of the ADF, both modern-day or former, has been charged with a strugglefare crime and slated for trial in a civilian courtroom docket,” he advised the ABC.