NZ officer ordered booby trap
A former Chief of Defence has revealed that a senior officer gave an order to set a booby trap during the war in Afghanistan - an act which, if carried out, could be considered a war crime.
Retired Lieutenant General Rhys Jones says charges against the officer were dropped ‘‘because he gave the order in the heat of the moment’’. The case has horrified military sources because booby traps have the potential to cause harm to innocent civilians. And Jones’ revelation has caused further alarm because of the way it seems an officer was apparently allowed to get away with a serious act. A source said it was ‘‘crazy’’ no one had been held accountable over the order. Stuff Circuit has learned that two officers were charged over the case, although both of them escaped punishment.
The booby-trapping allegations, which date back several years, have been shrouded in secrecy, in part because of suppression orders imposed in a military disciplinary process under the Armed Forces Discipline Act.
Even the suppression orders themselves are secret - the New Zealand Defence Force refused to provide a copy when asked by Stuff Circuit.
And the Defence Force has given Stuff Circuit three different versions of what happened to the officers. At one point, the Defence Force said ‘‘investigations were undertaken and no charges were laid’’. Later it said two officers had been charged with negligently failing to perform an order, and had been found not guilty. Then, last month, it said the charges had been ‘‘dismissed due to a lack of prima facie evidence. Permanent name suppression was ordered in respect of both individuals’’. Commodore Ross Smith defended the difference between the Defence Force’s statements about what had happened to the charges saying ‘‘the end result is the same...as the allegations were not upheld’’. But the handling of the case raises questions about the transparency over serious allegations.
Jones’ revelations, during an interview as part of Stuff Circuit’s The Valley documentary series, add another twist.
Challenged about whether a senior officer should issue such an order, even in the heat of the moment, Jones said the officer who gave the initial order was spoken to by his superiors.
‘‘There were a lot of the senior commanders who did talk to him about that. Okay, we can understand in the environment he was in and I think everyone in his command chain was debriefed just to say, hey, this is why that decision was taken. This is the circumstance but it re-emphasises the rest of the command chain did the right thing.’’
Documents show the order was allegedly given during an operation in Bamyan but was challenged by a soldier who said it would be illegal to carry out the order. A second, more senior officer overruled the soldier.
A source has told Stuff Circuit the soldier then raised the issue with superiors in New Zealand. Soldiers on the ground also pushed back saying they weren’t trained to set booby traps.
The alleged order was given after the discovery of a cache of insurgent bombs.
Jones said the order had come about out of frustration at New Zealand soldiers being targeted by bombs.
‘‘In times of stress some people have made a statement ‘Yeah, we should boobytrap them because they boobytrap things for us’ but it never happened.
‘‘New Zealanders were never involved in that, and again, part of our training, part of the emphasis that we’ve always put onto our soldiers on here is ‘ We don’t do that, we’ve actually got to be squeaky clean’. We’re in Afghanistan, not for any national reasons, but just to help the people and I think New Zealanders have, or New Zealand soldiers that were deployed over there, had a very good understanding of what we were trying to achieve.’’