A long-lost Dutch intelligence report about a possible war crime by Australian soldiers in Uruzgan in 2010 has surfaced. This is what outgoing Minister of Defense Kajsa Ollongren (D66) wrote on Friday in a letter to Parliament. Defense previously examined more than a million digital documents and meters of paper archives in search of the report, and announced last October that it was giving up the search.
The reason for the search was an article in NRC. It stated that Dutch soldiers reported a possible war crime by Australian military elite units in 2010. These Australian soldiers are said to have tortured and murdered an Afghan citizen near Camp Holland. When the Dutch interrogation and intelligence team heard this, one of them asked special report on.
Defense did nothing with that report for ten years, until the so-called Brereton report was released in Australia in 2020, containing strong indications of war crimes committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan. Several MPs then asked the Ministry of Defense about the document, but it turned out to be untraceable.
This remained the case until this week, while “putting the mission archives in order”, the ministry came across a data carrier on which the report in question turned out to be contained. Minister Ollongren writes that he has ordered “the facts surrounding the report now found” and promises to keep the House informed of the results.
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