The ABC has apologised to its audience, military commandos and a former US drug enforcement official over errors in its ‘Line of Fire’ reports about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Five additional gunshots were added to a clip in which a soldier fired a single warning shot from a helicopter as it flew above an Afghan compound where unarmed civilians walked below.

The interim findings from an ABC report released this week found the ‘audio editing error’ arose through an ‘inadvertent consequence of attempts to create clean, accurate and effective sequences in the story’.

The video was aired by the ABC in 2022 but former special forces commando Heston Russell revealed the inaccuracies in the footage in an interview with Seven’s Spotlight program earlier this year.

The ABC removed the 56-second clip from an online article after it acknowledged the error in the video and initiated an independent investigation.

‘The ABC sincerely regrets and apologises for the editing errors in the video clips, including to members of the 2nd Commando Regiment,’ ABC news director Justin Stevens said in a statement this week.

‘The ABC stands by the vital importance of its investigations into the alleged conduct of Australian soldiers. 

‘The editing errors, while deeply regrettable, do not weaken the value of the ABC’s reporting over many years on these crucial issues.’

The review also found comments from former Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) leader Bret Hamilton had misrepresented him.

‘The review found Mr Hamilton’s final comment in an interview that alleged war crimes should always be investigated was not in proper context and therefore did not accurately represent him as talking about allegations of war crimes in general rather than referring to any specific allegations,’ Mr Stevens said.

‘The review found this was potentially misleading. It found Mr Hamilton’s views were otherwise accurately represented.

‘ABC News sincerely regrets and apologises to Mr Hamilton as well as our audience members for this. That was not the meaning we intended to convey.’

The interim review is being carried out by former ABC and SBS veteran journalist turned media executive Alan Sunderland.

During senate estimates on Tuesday, ABC acting managing director Melanie Kleyn said the report found ‘no evidence of any intent to mislead by any ABC employee’.

Ms Kleyn said there was ‘not a deliberate editorial decision to include additional gunshots to mislead or deceive’ and refuted the suggestion that the central focus of the entire story was misleadingly altered.

‘The review has also found that the stories contained important issues that are in the public interest in relation to the issue of altered audio,’ she said. 

According to the interim report there was no deliberate effort to ‘distort the depiction of the events that occurred’ by the ABC. 

Mr Stevens also denied the footage was deliberately doctored and criticised the response from competitor media companies.

‘The great shame from all of this is that for weeks, various outlets have accused journalists of the highest integrity of doctoring material, which is one of the most offensive and damaging allegations one can make against a journalist,’ he said.

‘The meaning of doctoring is to deceitfully change something intentionally. What Mr Sunderland’s review shows independently is that our team and journalists and executives at all levels did not doctor any material. 

‘So there was mistakes, but it was not deliberate, and there was no doctoring.’ 

The ABC was also questioned on why it did not act on a letter sent by Mr Russell’s lawyers on November 22, 2022, after the footage was initially aired.

Ms Kleyn said the broadcaster’s news division was ‘not handed a copy of that letter,’ with Liberal Senator Sarah Henderson lashing her comments as ‘outrageous’.

‘Mr Russell’s lawyers were writing to your lawyers, saying you’ve got it wrong. You’ve put these fake gunshots in the video and what? No one did anything?’ she said.

‘Are you telling me that the lawyers just sat on their hands and did nothing. Did they tell anyone in news?’

During this period, Mr Russell had already launched defamation proceedings against the ABC and was later awarded $390,000 in damages in October, 2023.

Mr Stevens said the issues should have been flagged with the ABC’s editorial team, instead of its legal team, but Senator Henderson rejected his claims.

‘There was every opportunity after that date between then and now for these issues to be brought to ABC news’ attention via a formal complaint, via the processes we have in place, and as far as I’m aware, that did not occur,’ he said.

Ms Kleyn said Mr Sunderland was still reviewing the circumstances around the letter ABC’s legal team received and why it wasn’t passed onto the news division.

She said the the final report would include a finding on the issue.