A key issue throughout the defamation trial he launched has focused on the placement of a partner force soldier dubbed Person 12 during an October 2012 mission in Khaz Oruzgan.
The former SAS corporal is accused of ordering Person 12 to shoot an Afghan prisoner “or I will” through an interpreter.
A serving SAS soldier codenamed Person 14 gave evidence that the Afghan soldier stepped forward and unloaded seven to 10 rounds into the detained man, under Roberts-Smith’s direct orders.
Roberts-Smith and four key witnesses submitted pre-trial evidence to the court that Person 12 could not have been present to carry out the alleged execution, because he had been removed from deployment months earlier.
Barrister Nicholas Owens SC, in his closing address to the Federal Court on Wednesday, said their lie was historical.
He pointed to a meeting between his witness – Person 14 – and Roberts-Smith at a Canberra cafe in October 2018.
The Victoria Cross recipient asked Person 14 to sign a statutory declaration saying media outlets had wrongly attributed his comments, but Person 14 refused saying that was his recollection.
“Person 14 has stood firm against the pressure that was applied to him by Mr Roberts-Smith,” Owens said.
“(It has now) been proved beyond a shadow of doubt that Person 12 was present, and Person 14 was accurate.”
Roberts-Smith is suing The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times over 2018 reports claiming he committed war crimes in Afghanistan including murder, and acts of bullying and domestic violence.
The 43-year-old denies all claims of wrongdoing, while the mastheads are defending them as true.
Owens said Roberts-Smith, along with close friends and witnesses Person 27, Person 32, Person 35 and Person 39, all colluded in a concerted effort to remove Person 12 from the scene.
This story was ultimately “frustrated” by classified defence documents produced at trial, disproving this story, Owens said.
And it was improbable that five independent witnesses had innocently mistaken the same event, he said.
“Mr Roberts-Smith was either the architect or the knowing beneficiary.
“It doesn’t matter where the ultimate source came from … he stood to gain from it and was responsible to call those witnesses.”
Owens said Person 14’s evidence regarding that mission was “astonishing and remarkable” in detail before any of the contemporaneous documentary evidence was available, backing it up.
The barrister also pointed to evidence that allegedly shows a post-mission report was doctored, to make the execution look legitimate.
Recorded communications show the prisoner count submitted to Australian headquarters at Tarin Kowt changed just 12 minutes before extraction to report a “second engagement”.
Earlier, Arthur Moses SC on behalf of Roberts-Smith submitted the media waged a sustained attack on the war hero based on rumour, hearsay and contradictory accounts from jealous and obsessed former colleagues.
Moses said it shattered his reputation and even if vindicated in what was often described as the trial of the century, it would take years for it to fully recover.
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