LONDON: British military personnel are not above the law, Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Parliament in the wake of a BBC investigation that alleged hundreds of people were unlawfully killed in Afghanistan by Britain’s elite Special Air Service.
Opposition parties have demanded an official investigation into the allegations, first put forward on the BBC’s “Panorama” program.
The program claimed that more than 50 people in Afghanistan may have been killed unlawfully by members of a single SAS unit.
Scottish National Party defense spokesman Stewart Malcolm McDonald said in Parliament that Britain’s Ministry of Defense was “determined to sweep under the carpet” unlawful killings by British forces when the matter had been raised previously.
He pressed Johnson on the potential for an independent inquiry into the allegations, but the prime minister said it was “longstanding practice” to avoid commenting on SAS activities.
However, Johnson added: “On the other hand … it does not mean that anybody who serves in Her Majesty’s Armed Forces is above the law.”
Armed forces minister James Heappey said that some claims featured in the “Panorama” episode had previously been investigated twice, but were found to be below the “evidential threshold.”
But he added that any new allegations would be investigated.
Reports analyzed by “Panorama” include details of more than a dozen night operations that followed a “kill or capture” ethos conducted by one SAS unit in 2010-11.
Witnesses who served with the unit told the BBC that they saw operatives kill unarmed people during the raids.
Operatives also allegedly planted AK-47 “drop weapons” around unarmed detainees to justify the killings.
Several SAS units competed with one another to record the highest number of kills, witnesses said.
