He opened his closing address by quoting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle The sign of four: “How many times have I told you that when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
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Those words, Moses told the court, “were spoken by Sherlock Holmes to his friend Dr Watson” and had been quoted in British and Australian trials. He accused the newspapers of urging the court to adopt the “anti-judicial” approach of the fictional detective.
“They want the court to accept a fanciful and salacious theory of cases based on conjecture, speculation and inaccurate testimony,” he said. “The case, with all due respect, is nonsense and frankly embarrassing.”
Moses said the newspapers’ defense was “more like a Walter Mitty production,” a reference to the fictional fantasist created by James Thurber, “than an attempt to imitate Sherlock Holmes.”
Roberts-Smith, a former SAS corporal, is suing the newspapers over a series of articles in 2018 that he says portray him as a war criminal who was complicit in the unlawful killing of unarmed Afghan prisoners. According to the rules of engagement that bound the SAS, prisoners could not be killed. The former SAS corporal maintains that any killing occurred legally in the heat of battle.
The papers are trying to mount a defense of the truth and allege in a written defense that Roberts-Smith was involved in six unlawful killings in Afghanistan between 2009 and 2012.
However, Owens has said the papers accepted they could not prove one of those murders because a former soldier who the media reported was crucial to establishing the indictment, called Person 66, objected to being brought forward. evidence by self-incrimination.
Moses said the papers “didn’t prove murder” and made submissions about one of the papers’ central allegations, that Roberts-Smith was involved in the 2009 killing of two unarmed Afghan prisoners in a complex called Whiskey 108.
“There were no murders at Whiskey 108,” Moses said. There was “no evidence” that any bodies had been exhumed or subjected to a forensic examination, he said, or that ballistics evidence had been examined.
He also took aim at the papers for failing to call a high-level Afghan soldier called Person 12, who the media allege Roberts-Smith ordered a second Afghan soldier to kill an unarmed prisoner in 2012.
“Is there a fear that he won’t support your case?” he said
The trial continues.
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