Witness agrees with Ben Roberts-Smith that no fighting-aged men were inside tunnel, court hears

Absence of people in tunnel key to Roberts-Smith's claim in defamation action that alleged war crimes couldn't have taken place

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The soldier who discovered the infamous tunnel in Whiskey 108 says there were no fighting-aged males hiding inside, backing Ben Roberts-Smith's version of events of a fiercely contested mission in Afghanistan, the federal court has heard.

Roberts-Smith's fourth soldier witness, a still-serving warrant officer anonymised as Person 29, gave evidence on Wednesday about a 2009 SAS raid on a compound known as Whiskey 108 in the village of Kakarak - an insurgent redoubt in Afghanistan's southern Uruzgan province.

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