Shots rang out. I hid behind a car. Then I wrestled the gun from the Bondi beach shooter

Last year, two men opened fire on a Jewish community in Sydney – and Ahmed Al Ahmed risked his life to disarm one of them. The man’s accomplice then shot him five times. He describes what he was thinking in those fateful moments, and what happened next

When he heard the loud cracks, one after another, Ahmed Al Ahmed’s first thought was that they were fireworks. But he was confused – it was still daylight. It was his cousin who realised they were gunshots, and shouted at him to run and hide. “We ended up hiding between two cars,” Al Ahmed remembers. It was like “hell”, he says, “something like the end of life. I can hear very heavy shooting, nonstop, and people screaming – women, kids, everyone.” He could feel his heart pounding and hear his rapid breathing.

By the time it was all over, 15 people, including a 10-year-old girl, were dead, and many more wounded, shot by two gunmen who opened fire on a Jewish community celebrating Hanukah at Bondi beach in Sydney. A 16th victim has just died in hospital, almost a year after the attack. One of the gunmen was shot dead by police.

On that early evening in December last year, Al Ahmed put his head up above the car where he was hiding for a second and saw a man, a figure dressed in black with a rifle, firing from a footbridge about 50 metres away. People were trying to flee and Al Ahmed watched as the man calmly shot at them, including a woman who was trying to make it to the parked cars near Al Ahmed. Thoughts of his family flashed past him. “Everyone started circling in my brain.” He tried to remember the passage of the Qur’an that would prepare him for what was coming: “Because I was thinking I’m going to die.”

Then another man with a gun appeared a few metres in front of Al Ahmed, but didn’t spot him. Al Ahmed says he wasn’t really thinking. “I just saw myself stand up, quietly, very quickly.” He crept around the car and then between two others, to get a better look. From here, he could see people lying dead and wounded. “I couldn’t handle people crying and everyone screaming, kids,” he says.

He prayed. Then he ran at the man. “As soon I reached him from his back, I hit him in his head. I was shouting, ‘Motherfucker, piece of shit! Stop what you’re doing!’ Then I put my hand around his neck and started shaking him.” The gunman was a large man, and strong, but Al Ahmed found some superhuman strength – some old injuries that had stopped him working for a while vanished in his rush of adrenaline – and he managed to get the man to the ground, while wrestling his gun off him with his left hand.

In the video of this taken by a bystander, Al Ahmed disarmed the gunman in less than 10 seconds. The men stared at each other.

“He was shocked,” says Al Ahmed, as if he was “a god, who had been allowed to do whatever he wanted” but had now been stopped. “That’s what came to my mind.” He looked “evil”, he says.

The man felt in his pockets – Al Ahmed thinks he was looking for another gun or a knife. “I said, ‘Leave before I shoot you.’” The man stumbled off.

“I just remember thinking to myself, ‘I have to put the gun down because I’m in a bad position now.’” He could hear sirens and, as a Middle Eastern man, he didn’t want police to jump to the wrong conclusion if they saw him with a weapon. “I put the gun down straight away, and put my hand up to say: ‘I’m peaceful.’”

But now the gunman on the footbridge was firing towards Al Ahmed. He hid behind a palm tree as well as he could, as bullets flew past. Then he was hit. Three other people – Boris and Sofia Gurman, and Reuven Morrison – who separately attempted to tackle the gunmen during the attack were shot and killed.

Al Ahmed, 45, has lived in Australia for 20 years now, and he’s at home in Sydney when we speak. But he grew up in Nayrab, a small town in Syria, where his father was a police officer. His father was strict, he says, and “very tough on his kids”. In his new memoir, Light Will Win, Al Ahmed describes an extremely hard childhood. As the eldest of seven, and as a son, he was expected to work to help support the family from a young age. His grandfather was a shepherd, and Al Ahmed had to help look after his sheep, getting out of bed at 3am and sometimes sleeping outdoors on cold mountainsides for several days at a stretch, guarding the flock from wolves and thieves. If he complained, he writes, he would be beaten.

Life didn’t get any easier when the family moved to a city for his father’s job. When he was about 10, he was working as a labourer, hauling heavy building materials. He wanted something different for his life, and he writes that even as a young boy he had already rejected the violence and aggression that he’d seen in the men around him.

He had wanted to be a doctor, but that level of education and training was out of the question. By the time he was 16, the family had moved again to Aleppo and he was working in an oil factory alongside his studies. At 18, Al Ahmed had to begin mandatory military service. Not wanting to go into the army, he chose the police. It felt, he says now, like two-and-a-half years were taken from his life. “It made me tough, made me responsible,” he says, but it was brutal.

The training compound was remote, high up in the mountains. “They humiliate you,” says Al Ahmed. “They don’t let you sleep. They force you up in the middle of the night.” The cadets were forced to lie in the freezing yard in their underwear, then drenched with cold water from the powerful hoses used for crowd control. They were pushed to exhaustion, and beaten if they couldn’t keep up with their training. Sometimes the cadets were whipped, he says. “There’s no human rights.”

His superiors, Al Ahmed writes, were sadists, looking to recruit similarly brutal cadets into the feared Syrian police force. Up to 300,000 people were “disappeared” under the Assad regime, many at the hands of the police. Because he was already tough, Al Ahmed writes that he was singled out as having potential and offered better treatment if he turned on his fellow cadets. He refused and was put in solitary confinement as punishment.

All of this made him even more determined to escape Syria, and he left in the early 00s, as soon as his military service finished. “I didn’t look back. I chose my life for myself, I chose my future. I wanted to feel freedom. I knew there was a better life, better opportunities.”

He arrived in Australia in 2006, after a stint in Dubai, where he helped his uncle set up a luxury car resale business. Starting out as an apprentice carpenter, he worked his way up to running his own company building formwork, the wooden frames used to shape concrete. He found he loved it – the teamwork, the manual work, the precise calculations involved. At one point, he had nearly 60 employees and was working on big construction projects all over Australia.

He applied for citizenship, met Alsu, the woman who would become his wife, and ran his construction business. Then some work injuries meant he couldn’t be as hands-on as he wanted, and the business suffered. By the time the pandemic finished it off, he says, he was ready for a change anyway. He spent the next few years running a convenience store in the Sydney suburb where he and his wife lived with their two young daughters. But he planned to return to construction, and by late 2025, he had sold his shop.

On that day in December, Al Ahmed had arranged to meet his cousin for coffee and they’d decided to go to the beach at Bondi. By the time they got there, in the late afternoon, cafes were closing. They tried several, until they spotted what looked like a festival in the distance and headed for it, thinking there would be a coffee cart there.

“When we started getting closer, I saw it was a Hanukah community festival. There’s lots of people, dancing, music.” There were two security guards, who told him they’d be welcome to come in. “I said, ‘Thank you very much, but I’m looking for coffee.’” He and his cousin started walking away. “Then we heard the first bullets.”

Within minutes, he had disarmed one of the gunmen and become the other’s target. “I was trying to squeeze my body behind the tree,” he remembers. “I felt something hit me, and as soon as the bullet hits my elbow …” He moves his left arm behind him to show how it was forced backwards. “Like maybe 20cm, 30cm behind my back. I hadn’t got any control of it.”

He remembers screaming in pain, and grabbing his paralysed left arm with his right hand to bring it back towards him, and safely behind the tree. “That was a terrible moment – my elbow had a hole and the blood was spilling, like a shower or a hose. I pressed my finger into the hole to stop the bleeding, but the amount of the bleeding had made my jeans, my shirt, wet, like someone had thrown a bucket of blood at me.” He says he remembers thinking: “I don’t want to die.”

Eventually the shooting stopped; the police had taken control. “My power and all my energy started dropping. I saw people run to me, first-aid people.” One woman ran up to thank him for what he’d done. Later, recovering in hospital, he learned he had been shot five times.

The “Bondi hero” has since been feted all over the world. Crowdfunding has raised over A$2.5m (£1.3m), and he has had surgery in the US, where he met the New York mayor, Zohran Mamdani. After Islamic State claimed credit for the Bondi attack, it was important for Al Ahmed that he was reported as a Muslim who played his part in defending Jewish people. Violence, he says, “is not part of my religion. I’m a Muslim, wishing peace for everyone, and I treat anyone as a human first of all. Religion is something that comes second.”

It hasn’t been an easy time, though. His recovery has been slow, and he is still waiting to see how much movement he will get back in his hand. He doesn’t sleep well and is in pain most of the time. “This is what it is,” he says. “No complaints.”

The money also appears to have created issues within his family. Al Ahmed was charged with assaulting his father in June, though the charges were dropped two months later. “It was a family situation,” Al Ahmed says now, insisting he did nothing wrong. Separately, two of his brothers have been charged with threatening him, and accused of trying to extort money from him. They have denied the charges.

He remains extremely grateful for the donations. “I didn’t expect anything from anyone,” he says, and it meant a lot that people came together. “I feel warmth from around the world: there’s still people that look after each other.”

He has watched the video of himself disarming the gunman many times. It’s partly to try to make sense of why it happened, he says, “and why to Australia”, a country he loves. “A human being can be worse than evil. I don’t like to hear about terrorists.” Naveed Akram, 25, is due to go on trial next year. His father, Sajid, the man Al Ahmed disarmed, was shortly afterwards shot and killed by a police officer.

When Sajid Akram was on the ground in front of him, did Al Ahmed consider shooting him? “No, it didn’t come to my mind. My target was to stop and to disarm him and to save people’s lives. But to have blood on my hands, no, it’s not me. I’m not authorised to take someone’s life, even if he’s evil.”

Does it change anything that after Sajid Akram ran away, he rejoined his son on the footbridge and started shooting again with another weapon? “No,” says Al Ahmed. “Whatever happened after I disarmed him, this is fate. It’s God.” He views what happened as “something God chose for me. I was in the position to save people.”

With some of the money raised, Al Ahmed has set up a foundation to campaign against violence, particularly against women and children. “I feel I can work to pass the message everywhere around the world to keep united and help each other.” In Australia, as elsewhere, antisemitism, Islamophobia and tensions about immigration are all on the rise. There has been a surge in support for the far right. “My message is to keep united and to wish peace for everyone,” says Al Ahmed. “We have to stand by each other and put hate to the side.”