By Sally Rawsthorne and Clare Sibthorpe
“May God protect your children, and may we see you in good health, God willing,” Ali Alghamdi wrote on Facebook alongside a selfie of him and his toddler.
Fast-forward five years, and the University of NSW student is behind bars in Sydney, accused of possessing more than 25,000 child abuse videos and images.
Ali Alghamdi told police he had child abuse material on his phone so he could report it to authorities.
Alghamdi, a 35-year-old Saudi Arabian national, was arrested on Monday by sex crimes detectives at the university campus in Randwick and charged with use carriage service to access child abuse material.
The part-time Uber driver is in Sydney on a student visa to complete his PhD in optometry at UNSW, Waverley Local Court heard on Tuesday afternoon. His wife and children, aged four and eight, joined him in Sydney a month ago.
“During a search of the man’s phone, police allegedly located over 25,000 videos and images of child abuse material, including 42 marked as favourites,” police said in a statement on Tuesday.
Alghamdi stored child abuse material on encrypted messaging apps, the court heard in an unsuccessful bail application on Tuesday afternoon, with one of his three email accounts allegedly containing almost 650 gigabytes worth of material.
“When initially questioned why he had favourited 42 files he said he did not know they were in his possession, and subsequently expanded on that [saying] he had obtained the material for the purpose of reporting child abuse material to authorities,” Commonwealth prosecutor Melanie Tam told the court.
The alleged child abuse material was “significantly depraved … including children between two and four years old and infants”, Tam said. The descriptions of the alleged material heard by the court are too graphic to publish.
“[The offending] allegedly happened in NSW between 2-16 May, 2023,” his lawyer Hisham Karnib said, noting that “we don’t even know if [Alghamdi] was in NSW at the time”.
Alghamdi came to the attention of a strike force that trawls the dark web for child abuse material in late 2022, Magistrate Michael Barko said.
“They searched devices which contained film which could only be said to be the most perturbing child sexual abuse,” he said.
“A lay person would be satisfied it’s the type of offending that would have the offender serve a long term of imprisonment. He tried to tell police he had this material because he had tried to report the material to police and happened to have the material on his phone two years after the event.”
Alghamdi will return to court in September.
Get alerts on breaking news as it happens. Sign up for our Breaking News Alert.