Afghan inquiry obtains deleted evidence from SAS computer server

One of the great controversies at the inquiry into war crimes allegedly carried out by UK special forces in Afghanistan has been the wiping of an SAS computer server which was likely to hold vital evidence. A quick reminder of the timeline: the Royal Military Police, which was investigating the killings, asked to access the server in October 2015. It took the SAS until December 2016 to agree but later that month, just a day or two before the RMP was due to be handed the data, everything on the server was permanently deleted. The SAS maintains it was an accident, but it wasn’t the first they’d had. Something alarmingly similar had happened a few years earlier. The absence of the server left a gaping hole in the inquiry’s evidence base. Now, astonishingly, it’s been filled. Someone – identity unknown – had a copy of everything on the server and handed it over. The inquiry confirmed yesterday that it is now working out how to access its contents.

The questions this episode raises are staggering, and the consequences could outdo them. This is some of the most top secret information imaginable. Who on earth could have had access to it and was prepared to make a copy? And what will the fall-out be for the SAS once the inquiry sees the evidence the regiment thought it had got rid of forever, whether accidentally or on purpose? 

The inquiry has begun already to cement the SAS’s reputation not for soldiering but for a wild unaccountability. Once we see the information it was prepared to lose, either carelessly or by design, the impact could be profound. The course of the Afghanistan Inquiry has been fundamentally changed.