Man shot by SAS wasn't Taliban: witnesses

A second Afghan villager has testified at Ben Roberts-Smith's defamation trial that a local man killed during an SAS raid in 2012 was not a Taliban fighter.

The Federal Court is hearing evidence from Afghan villagers via audio-visual link from Kabul about an SAS mission in the Uruzgan province village of Darwan on September 11, 2012, during which SAS soldiers killed a man named Ali Jan.

Mr Roberts-Smith claims Ali Jan was a Taliban spotter while the respondents - The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and The Canberra Times - say he was a farmer who was kicked off a cliff.

On Wednesday, the trial heard from Darwan villager Man Gul, a distant cousin of Ali Jan, who said he lived close to him and knew him as a married man who "was martyred" seven or eight years ago.

"Was Ali Jan connected to the Taliban in any way?" the respondents' barrister Nicholas Owens SC asked Mr Gul.

"No, no, he was a labourer, I told you, he was keeping animals or selling wood," the witness replied via a Pastho interpreter.

The court heard that on the day Ali Jan died, Mr Gul prayed at a village mosque and was on his way to cultivate crops in a nearby field when foreign soldiers arrived in helicopters.

Mr Gul said soon after he was attacked by a black dog brought by the soldiers, then tied with his hands behind his back and taken to a wall in front of a guesthouse.

After that, the witness said he was hit twice by a "big soldier", before being asked about rogue Afghan soldier Hekmatullah and the whereabouts of Taliban.

The trial has previously heard that the SAS mission was part of a search for Hekmatullah, who had killed three Australian soldiers in the previous days.

"They told me where are the Taliban? I told them the Taliban are not sitting here with you, they are in the area, in the region," Mr Gul told the court.

He testified that Ali Jan and another villager, Mohammed Hanifa, were taken away and he was told the pair were going to be shot dead.

"Did you see the big soldier from this point?" Mr Owens asked.

"No after this the big soldier went away from me," he said.

Earlier, Mr Hanifa told the court that Ali Jan was not a Taliban fighter and vowed to tell the truth about the incident at Darwan even if it meant dying for it.

"This is the Pashto custom, it is the tradition," he said.

"If you witness something like a crime you have to testify about it, even if somebody wants me to go to Australia, or to the US, or to any other country in the world I would go there and I would testify," he said via the interpreter.

"Ali Jan was a labourer, he was a labourer, he was a labourer."

Mr Hanifa, who spent more than two days testifying, said he saw a big soldier kick Ali Jan into a river bed and then witnessed two soldiers drag him across the ground to a berry tree.

He also testified that he later found Ali Jan dead with gunshot wounds in a field.

He said Ali Jan was a poor man who owned some cattle, sold wood and used water from a spring to irrigate fields, and who wanted to protect his family and property.

Despite Sydney's coronavirus lockdown, the trial has temporarily resumed this week to take evidence from the Afghans as the security situation in Kabul deteriorates

A case management hearing early on Wednesday heard that a potential date for the trial to recommence after the Afghan evidence finishes was November 1.

It also heard that the trial would not be relocating from Sydney.

The trial continues on Thursday before Justice Anthony Besanko.