(JustPatriots.com)- According to reports, 41-year-old Australian veteran Oliver Shulz was detained in New South Wales and will appear in court on Tuesday, making him the first veteran in Australia to be charged with a war crime.
He might get a lifetime of incarceration if he’s proven guilty.
In 2012, footage from Uruzgan Province, which is in southern Afghanistan, showed “Soldier C” shooting an Afghan man in a wheat field. Shulz is Soldier C.
A four-year investigation was led by Paul Brereton, a major general in the Army Reserve and a judge on the New South Wales Supreme Court. The Office of the Special Investigator (OSI) conducted the investigation.
The Brereton Report, released in 2020, revealed evidence that Australian special forces murdered 39 Afghan civilians during the conflict. It’s possible that nineteen active and former members of the SAS are being probed for their roles in the deaths of prisoners, farmers, and/or whole communities between 2009 and 2013.
The investigation lasted four years and concluded that the murders of the 39 people occurred in 23 separate episodes. Yet, the study omits many specifics about the horrific treatment that at least two victims endured before they died. Australia’s special forces probably killed noncombatants.
Life in prison is the maximum penalty for the crime.
On Monday, Shulz was apprehended in NSW and remanded to police custody.
In the future, he will go before a judge in Sydney.
Crimes were believed to have stemmed from an unrestrained “warrior culture” within the Australian Defense Force (ADF).
Tim McCormack, a law professor at the University of Tasmania is an adviser on war crimes for the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, has said that the handling of Mr. Shulz’s case should serve as an “important precedent” for the West and its allies when dealing with suspected wrongdoing in the military.
A current or former member of the ADF has never been charged with a war crime or scheduled for trial in a civilian court.
