Afghanistan inquiry releases SAS raid photos not previously sent for expert tests

The Afghanistan inquiry has released photographs of people killed in two SAS operations in 2011, as a former military police investigator acknowledged that the images had not been sent to experts for examination.

The inquiry’s lead barrister, Oliver Glasgow KC, said the photographs could be evidence of possible war crimes and warranted expert scrutiny, the BBC reports. The inquiry is now having them examined forensically.

Seventeen people were killed in the two operations in Helmand province. Sky News reports that nine died in a raid on 7 February and eight in another two days later. The BBC says the youngest people killed in the respective operations were 15 and 14.

The images show several people lying in bed, some with head injuries and their heads on pillows. Glasgow said further analysis might establish whether people in the photographs were asleep when they were shot.

According to the BBC, official special forces accounts said Taliban fighters opened fire as troops entered the compounds and the SAS returned fire. Glasgow said the photographs appeared to contradict those accounts. The images do not, by themselves, establish whether those pictured were asleep or armed when shot, or whether they were unlawfully killed.

Lieutenant Colonel John Harvey, a senior officer in the Royal Military Police investigation, accepted that the photographs had not been submitted to experts, Sky News reports. The BBC says that was despite repeated requests from police investigators for further testing. Glasgow suggested that an examination might also have cleared the special forces of wrongdoing.

The public inquiry is examining allegations that British special forces deliberately killed Afghan males during detention operations between 2010 and 2013, as well as whether concerns were properly addressed and the subsequent police investigation was adequate. The allegations remain unresolved.

When the inquiry was announced in 2022, defence minister Andrew Murrison said the earlier investigation, Operation Northmoor, should have begun sooner but that there had been insufficient evidence for prosecutions. Last month, inquiry chair Lord Justice Haddon-Cave said a team of experts was examining some 10,000 photographs from detention operations across the wider inquiry for their evidential value.