A serving member of UK Special Forces, anonymised as N5461, has told the Independent Inquiry Relating to Afghanistan that the boundary between lawful and unlawful killing during British operations was “wafer thin”, and that some operational reports from the period were so poorly constructed that he now “questions the accuracy” of their accounts of how Afghan detainees died.
Giving evidence in a closed session in summer 2024, N5461 described the climate in which UK special-operations units conducted kill/capture raids in Helmand in 2010–11. He accepted that extra-judicial killing — “EJK” — was a risk, adding: “Extra-judicial killing can always happen. That’s something that we train for.” The distinction between lawful use of force and an unlawful killing, he told the Inquiry, was often “from one minute you go from a lawful killing to an extra-judicial killing and it’s wafer thin… it’s a constant risk.”
He went further, saying the normalisation of violence inside the task force could cause a slippage: “They are openly reporting on the people who are killing, right, so that’s just a slow normalisation of violence and it doesn’t take much of a cognitive shift… you’re asking them to make some pretty challenging decisions in the heat of the moment. So you’re constantly on a knife edge with that, I think.”
Much of N5461’s testimony revolved around written operational summaries (OPSectors or “OPSUMs”) produced by UKSF1, with which his own sub-unit often worked. He told Counsel to the Inquiry he was “surprised about the casual nature with which these were produced”, despite being relied upon later as formal records. Many, he said, appeared to contain “assumed knowledge”, written by soldiers with “no training” in reporting who drafted accounts “in the early hours of the morning” without appreciating that they could later serve as legal documents.
The witness questioned accounts describing detainees being taken back into compounds and later killed. In relation to an OPSUM for Objective TYBURN, which described two separate instances of detainees re-entering a building and dying, he said: “I just don’t understand why they were, how they had got themselves back into that situation…I don’t think that’s likely. There is a lot of information there explaining, but I just don’t understand why they, what they hoped to achieve by putting people back into the building.”
Pressed on whether the OPSUM was “plausible”, he replied: “Based on my experience… losing control of an individual, I don’t think that’s likely that that happened.” For the same thing to happen twice on one objective, and apparently again a few days earlier, was “concerning… by the time you are on three or four, [N2107] described it as ‘beginning to look bone’. I think it probably was.”
He confirmed he did not think a highly trained sub-unit would ever allow a detainee to roam freely or reach for a grenade. “You would never, ever take my eye off the [entry point]… If you ever take your eye off [the entry point], the lads will get you. Don’t, don’t do that.” The idea of a detainee twice presenting a lethal threat was, he said, “not something I can imagine… you can quite easily scare people into doing what you want them to do.”
Where OPSUMs referred to detainees “keeping grenades in their pockets”, he was skeptical of the notion: “There is no one who is keeping grenades in their pockets… I don’t know what I was making a reference to… it’s unlikely, it’s unlikely.” Grenades, he said, are “not for killing people, they’re for shocking them” and are “the worst you could choose to use” to threaten a trained British sub-unit.
He also suggested he had noted the lack of information coming from UKSF1 during the period. While reviewing the OPSUMs in early 2011, he had written sarcastically to colleagues asking whether “anybody has come up with an explanation” for the repeated pattern of detainees dying. “Why haven’t they given me all the information I need to understand what’s happened on that?” he told the Inquiry. “Why would you withhold something from me like that? I don’t know.”
Discussing the broader culture, N5461 said there were “very different identities” between sub-units within UKSF3, describing another unit as an “incredibly homogenous organisation” with an overriding culture that created a “less hostile environment”. He acknowledged rivalry between UKSF1 and UKSF3 but characterised the portion he saw as “fairly healthy… notwithstanding some unhealthy aspects”.
The Inquiry also heard internal emails in which officers described a “serious amount of questionable behaviour from [UKSF1]” that was “gathering momentum”, and another referring explicitly to extra-judicial killing: “20110216-EJK S”. N5461 did not recall receiving this but accepted that the flow of communications at the time indicated unease among staff officers.
Throughout his testimony he stressed that the danger of sliding from lawful to unlawful killing demanded constant vigilance: “There’s a spectrum… it’s not either/or EJK or poor reporting. It’s somewhere between that… but most people know that if you write this up badly it can look bad, so why are they not giving me the information so I don’t have to start second guessing?”
As the Inquiry parses the inconsistencies between OPSUMs, internal emails and witness accounts, N5461’s evidence marks a rare admission from within the special-forces community that extra-judicial killing in Afghanistan was not only possible, but a risk inherent to the missions being conducted — and that some of the official accounts relied upon today may not withstand scrutiny.
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