TWO SAS soldiers are alleged to have been arrested in a drugs raid in Herefordshire.

The Daily Mail reports that armed police arrested two serving SAS men and one of their wives in a drugs bust at a farm in Herefordshire.

The national paper said quantities of a suspicious substance were seized by police in the raid.

Three people have since been bailed on suspicion of class A drug offences, the Daily Mail said, reporting that West Mercia Police has referred all enquiries to the Ministry of Defence, which confirmed it was aware of an investigation but declined to comment further.

Herefordshire has long been the home of the elite Special Air Service regiment, which was founded as a regiment in 1941 by David Stirling, after whom the Credenhill Stirling Lines camp is named.

Hereford Times:

The unit specialises in a number of roles including counter-terrorism, hostage rescue, direct action and covert reconnaissance.

It has been involved in some of the most high-profile military operations in recent history, with its claims to fame including the Iranian Embassy siege in 1980, when six armed men took 26 people hostage within the building. 

The hostage takers were Iranian-Arabs campaigning for the sovereignty of Khuzestan, a province in the south west of the country.

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They demanded the release of prisoners held in Iran, as well as their own safe passage out of the UK.

In one of the elite unit’s most famous operations, the SAS soldiers stormed the embassy in 17 minutes on day six of the siege, rescuing all but one of the hostages, and killing five of the six hostage-takers in the process.

However the unit has not been free from controversy, with a 2022 BBC Panorama documentary alleging that it had uncovered 54 suspicious killings carried out by one British SAS unit on a six-month tour of Afghanistan, where soldiers were tasked with targeting Taliban leaders and bomb-making networks in 2010-11.

Panorama claimed that senior officers did not report the alleged murders and did not disclose the evidence held by UK Special Forces to the military police.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) said at the time that it believed the Panorama programme “jumps to unjustified conclusions from allegations that have already been fully investigated”, but that it was open to considering new evidence.

The independent inquiry is now investigating alleged unlawful activity by British Armed Forces in Afghanistan during the period from mid-2010 to mid-2013