The public inquiry into alleged SAS war crimes in Afghanistan has obtained a previously deleted cache of data that could hold crucial evidence, the BBC can reveal.
The files were permanently erased from a server by a UK Special Forces contractor in 2016, during a murder investigation into the SAS.
But the public inquiry team has now secured backups of the server – part of a Special Forces communications system codenamed “Sonata” – believed to have been created before the files were erased.
The backups are likely to contain information about SAS operations on which members of the elite regiment were suspected of unlawfully killing unarmed Afghan detainees and civilians.
A spokesperson for the inquiry confirmed to the BBC that they had obtained the backups, adding: “We now hold the relevant material and are exploring a technical solution to retrieve and review the data to determine its relevance to the investigation.”
The spokesperson said the inquiry team was approached during several days of hearings about computer evidence last December by someone offering them access to the backups, but the inquiry declined to comment on the source of the offer.
This is the first time backups of Sonata have been obtained by investigators outside UK Special Forces, which blocked previous efforts by the Royal Military Police (RMP) to copy the server.
To the dismay of the RMP investigators, a contractor hired by UK Special Forces (UKSF) during the murder investigation ran a program on the server in 2016 designed to permanently erase previously deleted files.
This process, known as “zeroing”, flew in the face of explicit instructions the RMP had given to UKSF that no data should be tampered with before the server could be copied.
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