“I have a memory and I know what I saw,” he told the Federal Court on Thursday.

The still-serving special forces soldier, known as Person 41, is giving evidence for three newspapers defending a defamation claim by Mr Roberts-Smith, one of the country’s most decorated soldiers.

The Victoria Cross recipient and retired SAS corporal, 43, says he was unlawfully defamed by reports alleging he committed murder and war crimes in the Afghanistan War. He denies any wrongdoing.

Person 41 told the defamation trial on Wednesday that during a 2009 mission to a Taliban compound, Roberts-Smith placed an unarmed Afghan man at the feet of a rookie SAS soldier and said “shoot him”.

He also testified that Roberts-Smith “frogmarched” a second man out of a courtyard, threw him to the ground and shot him. The second man’s prosthetic leg was later taken to the SAS’s base and used as a drinking vessel.

Person 41 was repeatedly challenged on Thursday about his version including his failure to speak about it until 2020.

“What I want to suggest is the reason you didn’t report it, is it didn’t happen,” Arthur Moses SC, for Mr Roberts-Smith, said.

“That’s incorrect. I know what I saw,” Person 41 replied.

Mr Moses: “Is it the case you think you know what you saw?”

Person 41: “I know what I saw.”

The soldier accepted the event caused him guilt “to some extent” and shame but no feeling that he was a coward.

“I was happy to put it in the back of my memory,” he said.

Going along with what happened was “sort of an unwritten rule” and he didn’t want to make waves on his first tour, he said.

But he accepted he complained about his patrol’s second-in-charge to his patrol commander while in Afghanistan and filled out a form on return to Australia that had “a crack” at the SAS’s highest officer “for not making logical decisions” during the tour.

On his account, a few minutes before Roberts-Smith ordered another rookie to execute the first Afghan man in a courtyard, Person 41’s patrol commander had been yelling into a tunnel connected to the courtyard.

“You’re lying, aren’t you?” Moses asked.

“No, I can recall this and I’m not lying,” the witness said, before accepting it wasn’t standard practice to call out in English to the Taliban.

The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Canberra Times have pleaded a truth defence to Roberts-Smith’s defamation lawsuit.

However, their version of the ordered execution portrays the VC recipient as an observer, not the one issuing the command.

Roberts-Smith has rubbished the execution suggestions, saying the first never occurred. The second supposed execution was, he said, his killing of an insurgent holding a bolt-action rifle.

A claim the man was ever a “person under control” was “so far from the truth it’s not funny … it’s ridiculous,” Roberts-Smith testified in June.

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