Sleepless nights, family tension and bullets in his arm: Bondi hero one year on

For Ahmed Al Ahmed, the scene is still vivid. On a beautiful Sydney summer evening, he is crouching between two cars in a parking area at Bondi Beach. The warm air is full of the sound of gunfire. And screaming. Terrified people are streaming past his hiding spot, running and stumbling. He tries to make sense of what he is seeing and hearing, but his brain seems to have frozen. Even his body is acting strangely. He looks down and registers that the knee he injured in a work accident, the one that hurts like hell to bend, is flexed beneath him. No pain at all. “My god,” he says to his cousin, who is sheltering beside him, “what is happening?”

It is just after 6.40pm on Sunday, December 14, 2025. In a couple of minutes, Al Ahmed will do something remarkable – something that will save many lives and irrevocably change his own. His action will be captured in a grainy video, which will be watched by millions of people around the world. He will be hailed as a hero by everyone from US President Donald Trump to King Charles III. He will be presented with a GoFundMe cheque for more than $2.5 million.

After the fanfare dies down, he will struggle to regain the use of his bullet-riddled left arm. His two brothers will deny charges of trying to extort money from him. His father will accuse him of assault, then retract the allegation. He will write a memoir. Al Ahmed has quite a year ahead of him.

But he doesn’t know any of that yet. For the moment, he is keeping his head down and listening to the shooting, which is getting closer. Heart thudding, he tries to remember the declaration of faith that Muslims are supposed to make to prepare for death. The words won’t come to him. Then a man steps into his line of vision. A man with a gun.

I meet Al Ahmed at Bondi on a day of swirling wind and rain. It is spring, but so cold that no one is swimming. The few walkers on the beachfront are wearing puffer jackets. Al Ahmed, 45, is smartly turned out in a blue sports coat, jeans and black loafers. His manner is reserved and courteous. Though he has lived in Australia for two decades, his English is heavily accented. “No one is going to forget that day,” he says.

At North Bondi RSL Club, he orders a chai latte. This surprises me a little because I know from his book, Light Will Win, that Al Ahmed is a coffee guy. In fact, it was a craving for caffeine that put him into the middle of the worst act of terrorism on Australian soil. The way he tells it, he had driven to Bondi from his home in the Sutherland Shire, in southern Sydney, picking up his cousin, Hothefa Al Kanj, on the way. By the time they arrived, it was after 6pm. At one cafe after another, they were told the coffee machine had been turned off for the day. Al Kanj was all for giving up and getting a Coke. Al Ahmed, though, was a man on a mission.

Music was coming from a lit-up park at the northern end of the beach. Some kind of market or fair, Al Ahmed presumed. He and Al Kanj walked to the entrance, where security guards said it was a Jewish community festival, Chanukah by the Sea. No coffee cart, unfortunately. “They said, ‘If you want to come in, you’re welcome’,” Al Ahmed remembers. “I said, ‘No, thank you. I want to keep going. For the coffee.’ ” He and Al Kanj turned away from the festival. They had gone about 10 metres when they heard a sharp cracking sound. Then another. And another. “I asked my cousin, ‘What is this? It’s fireworks?’ ”

Al Kanj said, “No. Run!” In a parking area overlooked by a pedestrian bridge that gave access to the beach from busy Campbell Parade, they ducked for cover between two vehicles. That’s where Al Ahmed was when the shooter appeared.

Fear was a familiar sensation to Al Ahmed. In news reports of what became known as the Bondi massacre, he was portrayed as an ordinary man who showed extraordinary courage. “I’m a normal guy,” he assures me more than once during our time together. “I’m the same as anyone.” But Al Ahmed had been tested in the course of his life. “For long stretches of my childhood,” he writes in his memoir, “fear was my only friend.”

He grew up in north-western Syria, near the border with Turkey. Wolves prowled in the mountains and, from his village of Al-Nayrab, could sometimes be heard howling in the distance. Most of the men in his family were shepherds, and as a boy he would trek with them into the hills, where they camped under the stars while their sheep grazed in the high pastures. Up there, the wolves sounded very close. He remembers huddling by the campfire, wishing dawn would come.

But the threat that felt biggest to Al Ahmed wasn’t out in the wild. It was inside his home. He claims in his book that his father, a policeman, was a hard and controlling figure who hit him at the slightest provocation. To me, he points out that this wasn’t unusual in the culture of the time. His father may have believed he was doing the right thing: his goal was to make his son tough. “Obviously he wanted me to be a strong man. But, you know, I was a child.” His beloved mother – “She’s the one who was caring” – would sometimes try to defend him, he says.

As the oldest of seven children, Al Ahmed was expected to contribute to the household income. From the age of nine, he fitted his schoolwork around a string of jobs: labouring, delivering groceries, picking olives. At 18, he embarked on two years’ compulsory military service, at his father’s suggestion opting to do his time in the police wing of the army. He writes that the police training academy was run by officers seemingly selected for their sadism: they subjected conscripts to bizarre acts of cruelty, such as forcing them to lie in the icy exercise yard in their underwear on mid-winter nights, then blasting them with near-freezing water from fire hoses. It seemed to Al Ahmed that the brutality of the regime of then-president, Bashar al-Assad, had poisoned Syrian society as a whole, and he decided he would leave his home country. His other resolution: to be a completely different man from his father. He would be gentle, not domineering. He would live and let live.

There were two shooters, Al Ahmed realised. One was on the pedestrian bridge. The other – 50-year-old Sajid Akram – was standing in front of Al Ahmed, but looking the other way, so hadn’t noticed him. Al Ahmed could see Akram’s likely next victims: people who were lying defenceless on the grass, some of them injured. Thinking back on it, he says he didn’t make a conscious decision to charge at Akram. Rather, he saw the opportunity and took it.

“He was a big guy,” he says. “Very muscly. Higher than me.” As Al Ahmed grabbed Akram from behind, he heard himself swearing in what he describes as “the Aussie way”. Something along the lines of, “You motherf---er. You piece of shit.” His right arm was wrapped around Akram’s neck. Al Ahmed’s other arm theoretically wasn’t capable of much: the rotator cuff on his left shoulder had been damaged in a car accident, and recent surgery hadn’t yet restored it to full strength. But as the two men tussled, that arm did everything Al Ahmed asked of it, including seizing Akram’s rifle. Suddenly Akram was lying on the ground and Al Ahmed was aiming the gun at him.

For Al Ahmed, getting out of Syria had felt like a release. He moved first to Dubai, where he and an uncle established a business importing and selling used luxury cars, then came to Australia. He arrived in 2006, aged 25, and says he felt at home from day one. He found employment on construction sites in Canberra and eventually qualified as a carpenter. He married Alsu, an Australian of Russian heritage, and in 2014 set himself up as a subcontractor, supplying teams of carpenters to building projects while continuing to ply his trade himself.

He was busy and happy. But one day on a worksite he ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament, or ACL. He had reconstruction surgery on his knee in 2020, starting the long process of regaining his mobility just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit the construction industry. He reluctantly closed his company and moved with Alsu to Sydney, where he opened a shop selling tobacco and assorted paraphernalia. (After he became famous, it was reported that he had pleaded guilty to a number of minor tobacco offences in 2022, the same year he was granted citizenship.) He says the shop was only ever a stopgap. He sold it late last year, before Bondi, with the intention of returning to carpentry.

When Al Ahmed came to Australia, he was keen to adopt local ways. He tried to learn to ride a surfboard but couldn’t get the hang of it: he kept falling into the water, and he wasn’t a strong swimmer. The waves scared him. He loved beaches, though, Bondi Beach in particular.

During his military service, Al Ahmed learnt how to clean a gun but not how to use it. He didn’t fire a single shot. At Bondi, he didn’t fire, either, which meant that Akram was able to get to his feet and retreat to the bridge. There he picked up another gun and resumed shooting before he was felled by a police bullet.

In the days afterwards, amid the outpouring of admiration for Al Ahmed, some wondered why he didn’t shoot Akram when he had the chance. Among them was Gefen Bitton, an Israeli man who had arrived at his side as he tackled Akram and seized the rifle. In a recent book, Bondi Terror, by Sharri Markson and Alex Ryvchin, Bitton says he yelled at Al Ahmed: “What the f--- are you doing? F---ing shoot him or give me the gun.”

I ask Al Ahmed if he has ever regretted not pulling the trigger. “Never, never, never,” he says. “My target, when I attacked him, was just to disarm him and stop him from killing people. Attempt to shoot him, no. I’m not the one who can do this. Taking the life of someone – it’s not my job.”

The other gunman, Akram’s son, Naveed, kept firing from the bridge, and both Bitton and Al Ahmed were seriously injured. Five bullets entered Al Ahmed’s left arm and shoulder. He says the medics who treated him improvised a way to get him to an ambulance. “They said, ‘Forgive us, but we need to put you on a surfboard.’ ” Lying on his back, looking at the sky as he was carried to the carpark, he reflected that his wife would be amused if she could see him: “Ahmed Al Ahmed, finally on a surfboard.”

The Akrams were supporters of Islamic State. Sajid was shot dead by police. Naveed would be charged with 78 offences, including 15 counts of murder and 43 of attempted murder.

Al Ahmed says Alsu wasn’t entirely pleased when she learnt what he had done. “She asked me, ‘You didn’t think about your kids?’ I told her, ‘I did think about my kids but forgive me, I couldn’t handle it. People crying. Women. And no one there. It was a hard situation.’ ” He says he emphasised to his wife that he hadn’t intended to put himself in danger. “I ran to protect myself, to hide from the firing, like everyone. But when the evil came in front of me, forgive me, I’m not the person who can sit and wait and look.”

Alsu and Al Ahmed have two daughters, Sofia, now aged 6, and Claudia, 3. Al Ahmed says Sofia had a question for him when she visited him in hospital. “She told me, ‘Dad, why didn’t you go to take the gun from the other guy, on the bridge?’ ”

The governor-general, Sam Mostyn, came to his bedside, too, as did Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the people who started the online appeal that raised more than $2.5 million for him from donors around the world. “He’d become a global story,” says Ian Robertson, a media law specialist and chair of legal firm Holding Redlich, who offered to help Al Ahmed navigate the unfamiliar territory in which he found himself. “He was not only getting inquiries from the Australian media, he was getting them from overseas as well. He was in pain, he wasn’t sleeping at all well, and he had this avalanche of people basically hounding him. So the job was to try to get that under control.”

Al Ahmed was part of a small group of Bondi survivors and first responders honoured at the Sydney Cricket Ground before the final Test of the summer’s Ashes series in January. As the applause of the huge crowd washed over him, he bowed his head and put his right hand over his heart. Soon afterwards, he accepted an invitation to the US, where he visited a holy site of the Jewish movement known as Chabad. He was photographed praying alongside Rabbi Yehoram Ulman, founder of Chabad of Bondi and father-in-law of Rabbi Eli Schlanger, one of the 15 people killed by the terrorists. That Al Ahmed wore a yarmulke, the traditional Jewish skullcap, drew criticism in some quarters. In his book, he explains that he believes in respecting others’ religious beliefs and customs. “If they were to visit my mosque, they would remove their shoes,” he writes. “It’s a matter of basic humanity.”

In New York, he met Democratic mayor, Zohran Mamdani, and was stopped in Times Square by a couple of cops on the beat, who asked if they could have a photo with him. Then it was on to Washington DC, where he was feted by members of the US Congress. They’d all seen the viral video. Most of them gave him medals. “They gave me their business cards as well,” he says. “Nice people. I love America.”

Back in Australia, Ian Robertson watched Al Ahmed get a standing ovation as he was presented with the key to the City of Canterbury-Bankstown, a local government area in south-western Sydney. “He was kind of mobbed by people wanting to shake his hand and pat his back,” Robertson says. “Everywhere I went with him, same reaction. People walked up to him in the street to say, ‘Good on you’.” In March, he was given the key to the City of Waverley, which incorporates Bondi. With the key came a lifetime beach parking permit – a welcome gift for a man who’d collected a few tickets there in his time.

Robertson likes the way Al Ahmed has handled the attention. “Polite, unassuming, humble,” Robertson says. “Obviously, what he’s done is amazing but he hasn’t sought to exaggerate it. Look, in my view he’s an all-round nice guy.”

Tears rolled down Al Ahmed’s cheeks as he sat in the studio of Sydney radio station 2GB on a morning in June. The previous month, his two younger brothers had been arrested and charged after he told police they had threatened to hurt him if he didn’t give them each $100,000 of the GoFundMe money. Both pleaded not guilty (and the case is still before the courts). Now Al Ahmed himself was in trouble. His father, by then living in Australia, had accused him of assaulting him, and Al Ahmed had been charged accordingly. “I’m honest. Innocent,” he told host Ben Fordham, who elicited from him that he believed his father was paying him back for reporting his brothers to the police. “Either I withdraw the case against the brothers or he will go put [a] case against me,” he said to Fordham.

In August, his father retracted his allegation and the charges against Al Ahmed were dropped. He tells me he holds no grudge – “We are human, we have to forgive” – but it is clear that the family conflict has shaken him. Less upsetting but nonetheless unsettling are the attacks online by total strangers. The nastiness of the anonymous critics bewilders him: “Who is this? I don’t know him. He doesn’t know anything about me.”

Al Ahmed still has two bullets in his left arm. Doctors have told him it’s best to leave them there. He hopes to get back the use of the arm and hand, but so far the improvement has been modest. The emotional wounds are still with him, too. He thinks a lot about the people who died at Bondi, especially the youngest of them, 10-year-old Matilda Britvan. He is acutely conscious that while he confronted a gunman and lived to tell the tale, others who did so – Boris and Sofia Gurman, Reuven Morrison – were killed. He takes sleeping tablets and anti-anxiety medication. “It’s a little bit to forget what happened,” he says. “Because the situation was too big. It was horrible.” He knows he isn’t the only one who can’t get the images out of his head. “I’m one of maybe hundreds, or thousands, of people who are struggling from this.”

He is pleased to have had the chance to put everything down in his book (which is a collaboration with the ghostwriter Liam Pieper, whose previous credits include The Happiest Man on Earth, the best-selling memoir of Holocaust survivor Eddie Jaku). Al Ahmed says his next project will be to establish a foundation to help women and children affected by domestic violence. A cause that is close to his heart.

It’s still raining when we leave the RSL club, so Al Ahmed and I share an umbrella. We head for the old palm tree that gave him some cover when shots were being fired at him that day, and he matter-of-factly shows me the marks made by four bullets that hit the thick trunk. Then we walk the short distance to the pedestrian bridge and stand underneath it, sheltering from the weather. Al Ahmed’s leather loafers are dripping wet. “They’re brand new. Just today,” he says as he wipes them with a tissue.

I commiserate. What a shame! “All good,” he says with a smile. “Doesn’t matter. I’m healthy. I’m here. I’m alive.”

Light Will Win: The Bondi Hero’s Story of Humanity, Hope and Courage (Pan Macmillan Australia) is out November 10.

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