Lawyers for Nine have allegedly backed down from a murder allegation from former SAS soldier Ben Roberts-Smith.
Roberts-Smith is suing the publishers of the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Canberra Times over articles that allege that Roberts-Smith committed war crimes in Afghanistan and assaulted a woman in Canberra.
A trial expected to span eight weeks is due to be in the Federal Court on June 7th, but Nine has rescinded the murder allegation according to The Daily Telegraph.
A Nine spokesman said: “Those four paragraphs are not necessary for our truth defence.”
According to the publication, Nine’s lawyers have written to Roberts-Smith to advise that they will “no longer be pressing the allegations” in relation to the death of an Afghan man.
In a statement, a spokesman for the Office of the Special Investigator said: “The defamation proceedings are a private matter to be resolved between the parties”.
“The Office of the Special Investigator is not, at this stage, in a position to form a view as to whether, or in what specific ways, the proceedings might impact on future investigations.”
Nine has also removed a former soldier from its witness list as a result of “his difficult life circumstances”.
