Usman Khawaja has blown the lid off Cricket Australia's official narrative of the 2018 "Sandpapergate" scandal, claiming that the entire touring party was well aware of the ball-tampering plot and that the team had successfully used sandpaper on the ball a game prior to the infamous Cape Town Test.

The southpaw is set to detail his explosive allegations in his upcoming autobiography, Sabr. While the book will be published on November 10, Khawaja – in a latest interview with the Nine papers – explicitly rejected the long-held assertion that only Steven Smith, David Warner, and Cameron Bancroft were involved in the scandal.

Notably, Smith and Warner had received 12-month bans from Cricket Australia, while Bancroft was suspended for nine months after being caught using sandpaper on the ball during the Cape Town Test.

"It was all of us. Not the batters, not the bowlers, not the staff. All of us," Khawaja said.

After the row in 2018, all the Australian bowlers involved – Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood, Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon – issued a joint statement, denying any prior knowledge of Bancroft's ball-tampering plans.

In 2021, the four frontline bowlers requested "an end to the rumour-mongering and innuendo" after Bancroft implied that the bowling unit was aware of cheating.

According to Khawaja’s book, however, open conversations about finding ways to rough up the ball using sandpaper began as early as the second Test in Port Elizabeth (now Gqeberha), before the plan unraveled on camera during the third Test in Cape Town.

Immediately following the match, Khawaja urged his teammates to take ownership as a collective unit rather than scapegoating individual players.

During the interview, the southpaw stated that he decided to come forward after eight years because he felt the three punished players deserved justice, and he expected the full truth would have emerged publicly by now.

"In an ideal world, I don't want to do this," Khawaja said. "I don't want to be the one who comes out and talks about the truth. The issue is that I genuinely thought after eight years the truth would have been out by now.

"Maybe I thought Davey would have exposed it, or someone else would have talked about it more. I just didn't think it was going to come down to this. But the longer it's gone on for, and right from the very start, I've been on the train of collectively taking it.

"Even in the change rooms when I was talking to them after the game. I said, 'Take this as a team'. We did this as a team. We knew what was going on, and we have to take it as a team, and so I was always of that stance.

"Obviously, it didn't work that way, and those three guys got crucified.

"I've seen Davey over the last eight years just get nailed bad over and over again, and it's taken a big man not to say anything and just to stay quiet.

"And he's just copped it and he's copped it and he's copped it.

"And then 'Bangers' [Bancroft] in the same note, particularly, he played a little bit of Test cricket after that, but then never came back in, even though he's been scoring a lot of runs. He's been a terrific cricketer for a long time, but I know it's something that hangs over his head.

"Even Steve Smith. Steve's lucky, the greatest batsman of my generation. He came back from that, and he's come back as good as he ever was in that first Ashes series, and it's kind of been forgotten for him in some respects. But I know he has never ever forgotten that year and how it all panned out.

"But I'm not doing this for any other reason than I think it's the right thing to do. I've always felt like there's more to life than just cricket, and these guys, in some respect, deserve that justice. And it just doesn't feel like anyone's going to give it to them. None of those three want to be the first to say anything. And rightly so, it will just be hearsay and 'their word' if they do. They needed someone else to say something."

Usman Khawaja expressed shock that Cricket Australia’s head of integrity, Iain Roy, never interviewed him during the swift 2018 probe, despite the fact that he sat directly next to Bancroft in the dressing room.

Khawaja believes he was deliberately bypassed because CA investigators knew he was ready to tell the truth.

"I was sitting next to Cam Bancroft that whole Test match, and I didn't get interviewed," Khawaja said. "I thoroughly feel that I didn't get interviewed because of that, because they knew that I wanted to take it as a team, because they knew I was ready to tell the truth if I was interviewed.

"And I was waiting for my phone to ring. It just never rang, and then the penalties were given, and I couldn't believe it."

In response to Khawaja’s claims, Cricket Australia issued a statement reiterating that they remain comfortable with the findings of the original 2018 integrity process, though they remain open to receiving any formal new evidence.

Previously, Australia’s current Test captain Cummins had given Khawaja the "heads up" to tell his story, noting that the team had long moved past the incident.