This is from a year ago, seems to be forgotten. Not exactly damning, but neither anything like support...Assistant Defence Minister and former elite soldier Andrew Hastie has told the Federal Court that it was a persistent rumour within the Special Air Service that war veteran Ben Roberts-Smith had kicked an Afghan prisoner off a cliff.
The federal Liberal MP and former SAS captain gave evidence in Mr Roberts-Smith’s defamation trial on Friday that another soldier, dubbed Person 7, expressed frustrations to him in 2014 that his concerns about Mr Roberts-Smith, including about the alleged cliff kick, had fallen on deaf ears.
Mr Hastie, who served in the SAS between 2010 and 2015, said it was a “fairly well-established rumour” that Mr Roberts-Smith had kicked a “PUC”, or person under the control of Australian troops, off a cliff in Afghanistan.
He said he had heard this allegation from “multiple people” and “soldiers are oral historians; things get passed around by word of mouth”.
Mr Hastie said Person 7 noted Mr Roberts-Smith was “Father Of The Year [in 2013] and enjoying a high profile in the community” and he was “greatly vexed that he’d raised a number of issues through the chain of command” about the decorated former soldier.
