New Photos Released in SAS Afghanistan Inquiry Show Victims Shot in the Head While Lying in Bed

On Tuesday, a UK public inquiry released photographs it describes as essential evidence, and they are hard to look at. Taken after two SAS night raids in Helmand province in 2011, they show people lying in bed, dead. One is tucked beneath a floral blanket. Others have their heads on pillows, with blood pooled around them. In one image, blood spatter low on a wall is consistent with someone being shot while lying down.

It is the first time the inquiry has made such photographs of the deceased public. The inquiry is examining allegations that the SAS murdered unarmed civilians and detainees on night raids between 2010 and 2013, and then planted weapons to cover up the killings. Its lead barrister, Oliver Glasgow KC, said the images may be evidence of possible war crimes and deserve expert examination. Many of the people pictured, he said, look like they sustained head shots, and in a number of cases there appears to be a dead body with his head on a pillow. Further analysis, he said, may be able to confirm whether they were shot while asleep.

Seventeen people died across the two operations. The youngest killed in each raid were 15 and 14 years old. Glasgow said the photographs appear to contradict the accounts the SAS gave, and that they should have raised serious questions for the military police officers who investigated the raids as potential murders.

Lt Col John Harvey, who led the military police murder investigation, agreed that the scenes did not look right. He told the inquiry his team was clear the photographs could be vital evidence. Yet despite repeated requests from the police investigators, the photographs were never submitted for further testing. One investigator, speaking to the BBC anonymously, said you can see why they were concerned, and that bullet marks on walls so close to the ground appeared to undermine the special forces' version of events. The inquiry is now putting the images through expert forensic analysis.

The official SAS accounts hold that Taliban insurgents opened fire as troops entered the compounds, and that the soldiers returned fire and killed those inside. BBC Panorama, which has investigated these allegations for more than eight years, found evidence pointing elsewhere. The inquiry was established in 2022 in the wake of its revelations. Panorama travelled to Afghanistan to gather evidence on four raids on homes that killed 26 people, and visited the same guesthouses where the newly released photographs were taken. Its team were the first British investigators to visit the sites, despite a five-year military police investigation.

Weapons experts told the BBC that Panorama's evidence indicated multiple rounds appeared to have been fired from above, which suggests those killed were lying down or sitting against a wall rather than caught in a firefight. Family members said their relatives had been shot cleanly in the head or chest, which they described as a common characteristic of a deliberate close-range SAS shooting. The inquiry's own barrister now cites multiple traumatic injuries to the head or face among those killed.

The inquiry has also heard evidence that casts doubt on how thoroughly the alleged crimes were investigated. Investigators were still in Afghanistan in July 2019, gathering evidence, while senior officers prepared to close the murder investigation and inform ministers. They were seeking eyewitnesses to unlawful killings and to the planting of weapons. One member of the Afghan partner unit that served alongside the SAS told military police he had personally seen a British soldier plant a rifle on an unarmed person after that person had been killed.

The forensic analysis is under way, and the inquiry will continue to examine why photographs its own investigators considered vital were never tested.