Part four: the tunnel

Ben Roberts-Smith v the media

On 12 April 2009, the SAS arrive in the village of Kakarak in Afghanistan’s Uruzgan province. It’s a Taliban stronghold where an Australian soldier was killed just a month earlier. It’s here, in a compound known as Whiskey 108, that one of the most contested events in this extraordinary defamation trial takes place. In their defence, the newspapers allege that at Whiskey 108 Ben Roberts-Smith murdered an Afghan man with a prosthetic leg and ordered a junior member of his patrol to murder another Afghan man as part of a military ‘blooding’ ritual. Roberts-Smith strenuously denies these claims and says the two men who were killed were legitimate engagements shot lawfully in the heat of battle. In this episode, Ben Doherty takes us inside the raid on Whiskey 108. We hear evidence presented by Ben Roberts-Smith and others who support his version of events, as well as witnesses for the newspapers, read by voice actors