Sergeant Blackman | SPIN ZHIRA

Sergeant Alexander Blackman, the Royal Marine jailed for shooting dead a wounded Taliban fighter has been released from prison.

Sgt Blackman received a life term in 2013 for murder, but his conviction was reduced to manslaughter at a second trial when it emerged that crucial evidence had been deliberately with-held by his chain of command.

Sergeant Blackman, who admits doing wrong, has been released after serving half of a seven year sentence and has been dismissed from the Royal Marines.

But what has happened to those officers who deliberately deceived the court at his original trial? It might be reasonable to assume that they too have been dismissed from service for their duplicity and lack of moral courage.

The Commandant General of the Royal Marines, Major General Robert Magowan, has said it is time to ‘move forward from the Blackman episode’ but continues to employ and promote the men who abandoned Sgt Blackman to his fate. The one officer willing to speak up for him and who provided the crucial evidence at his second trial has been dismissed.

It is another sad example of how the military top brass continue to fail the men and women under their command, eroding the values and standards on which our Armed Forces are founded.

SPIN ZHIRA: Old Man in Helmand is the unauthorised, unvarnished and irreverent story of one man’s midlife crisis on the front line of the most dangerous district in Afghanistan where the locals haven’t forgiven the British for the occupation of 1842 or for the Russian Invasion of 1979. Of course, all infidels look the same so you can’t really tell them apart.

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Christina Lamb reports on the case of Royal Marine Sergeant Blackman, now cleared of murdering a Taliban fighter in 2011.

How did one High Court Judge find Sgt Blackman guilty of murder while another dismissed the charge? It seems that crucial evidence was deliberately with-held at his original trial. Sergeant Blackman was therefore ‘sentenced by an authority blind to facts that offered serious mitigation on his behalf.’ This resulted in ‘a failure of moral courage by the chain of command, the burden of which was carried by the man under command.’

We know that Sgt Blackman was deliberately abandoned to this fate because the one officer willing to speak up for him was silenced and eventually resigned his commission in order to present his evidence at the second trial.

It is another sad example of how the military top brass continue to fail the men and women under their command, eroding the values and standards on which the British military is founded.