Australian soldier first to be tried as war criminal

​An Australian soldier allegedly shown in a TV documentary shooting an Afghan man in a field a decade ago has become the first to be charged with a war crime under the country's laws.

Oliver Schultz, a former SAS soldier, has been charged following an investigation by the Office of the Special Investigator (OSI). The offence carries a maximum sentence of life in jail.

The OSI was set up to investigate alleged war crimes following a four-year inquiry led by an Army Reserve major general and NSW Supreme Court judge Paul Brereton.

TV channel the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) says Mr Schulz is the person referred to as Soldier C in a 2020 ABC Four Corners documentary exposing alleged war crimes.

The Australian soldier served in Afghanistan eleven years ago.

Video footage showed Soldier C shooting an Afghan man in a wheat field in Uruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan in 2012. Mr Schulz will appear in court on Tuesday, after being arrested in New South Wales.

The Brereton Report, released in 2020, found there was "credible evidence" that Australian elite soldiers unlawfully killed 39 people during the Afghan war.

It said 19 current or ex-special forces soldiers should be investigated by police over killings of "prisoners, farmers or civilians" from 2009 to 2013. This is believed to be the first arrest linked to that inquiry.

At the time, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) blamed crimes on an unchecked "warrior culture" among some soldiers.

Tim McCormack, a law professor at the University of Tasmania and special adviser on war crimes to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, said Mr Schulz's case should set an "important precedent" for the West and its allies on how to handle suspected wrongdoing in the military.

"We've never had a situation in the past where a member of the ADF, either current or former, has been charged with a war crime and slated for trial in a civilian court," he told the ABC.

The Four Corners documentary series posted a picture of Mr Schultz on Twitter. It wrote: “SAS veteran Oliver Schultz has been arrested as part of a war crimes investigation into the killing of an Afghan man in a field.”