Bondi Beach Shooting: Ahmed Al Ahmed Identified as Hero Who Disarmed Shooter, Not Edward Crabtree

At least 15 people were killed after a father-son duo, identified as Sajid Akram and Naveed Akram, opened fire at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia targeting Jewish people attending a Hanukkah event on Sunday (December 14, 2025).Shortly after the attack, footage of a civilian bravely tackling and disarming one of the shooters before pointing the gun at him began circulating widely online. While the man was widely hailed as a hero, several social media posts also falsely identified him as Edward Crabtree. Multiple news outlets later identified the man as Ahmed Al Ahmed, while we traced the viral name, “Edward Crabtree,” to an article uploaded on a dubious website.Evidence We began our investigation by searching keywords such as “Bondi Beach firing man disarmed shooter.” This led us to a report published by ABC, dated December 14, 2025, which identified the man who ran toward one of the gunmen and seized his weapon as 43-year-old Ahmed Al Ahmed. Ahmed’s parents, Mohamed Fateh Al Ahmed and Malakeh Hasan Al Ahmed, told ABC he was shot four to five times in his shoulder, with several of the bullets still lodged inside him. They had reportedly landed in Sydney from Syria only a couple of months ago, but their son came to Australia in 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald corroborated that the hero who tackled and disarmed one of the shooters was Ahmed Al Ahmed. A separate report by Reuters also identified the man who seized the gun as Ahmed Al Ahmed. Reuters quoted his cousin, Jozay Alkanji, who said Ahmed had undergone surgery and may require further medical procedures depending on doctors’ assessments.According to this Al Jazeera report, dated December 14, 2025, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Monday confirmed media reports that Ahmed Al Ahmed was the bystander who intervened. “Ahmed Al Ahmed took the gun off that perpetrator at great risk to himself and suffered serious injury as a result of that, and is currently going through an operation today in hospital,” Albanese told reporters.Notably, we did not find any credible Australian or international media reports identifying the man as Edward Crabtree.While tracing the origin of the viral name, we came across an article published on a website named The Daily AUS (thedailyaus.world), which identified the saviour as Edward Crabtree.A closer examination of the article revealed multiple factual inaccuracies. For instance, it claimed that the attack began at 2:47pm on Saturday, whereas official police statements stated that emergency services were called to Bondi Beach at 6:40pm on Sunday.The article also falsely claimed that the Australian Prime Minister visited “Crabtree” in hospital. However, no credible media outlet or official source has reported such a visit.We further examined the website and found several red flags. While the Edward Crabtree article was authored by “Rebecca Chen,” most other articles on the site were attributed to “Sarah Johnson,” with no verifiable author profiles.We also ran a section of the article through AI-detection tools. ZeroGPT indicated a 94.41% probability of AI-generated content, while Copyleaks flagged 100% of the text as likely AI-generated content.A review of the other elements/tabs of the website revealed additional concerns. For instance, the sections such as About Us, Contact, Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, Accessibility were non-functional. Category pages such as Sports, Entertainment, Lifestyle, and Opinion also led to error pages. The sign-in option on the website was non-accessible too and we were not able to find any associated social media handles.Newschecker checked the website on website Whois.com which showed that the website was registered on December 14, 2025, the same day as the attack, with key registration details withheld, another significant red flag.The ‘Registrant Contact’ is mentioned as Kalkofnsvegur 2, Reykjavik (Iceland), and the email address listed for the site is registered with “@withheldforprivacy.com”Interestingly, Kalkofnsvegur 2 is also the registered address for Withheld for Privacy. As per an article by The New York Times published in October 2024, “…but there is no outward sign that the service (Withheld from Privacy) occupies space in the six-story building…“Because Withheld for Privacy uses the building’s address as a default for its clients, Kalkofnsvegur 2 has been linked to online forums used by a white supremacist group in the United States… to phishing sites posing as companies such as Amazon, Coinbase and Spotify to steal money and personal information from visitors; and to Russian influence campaigns intended to spread fake narratives to unsuspecting Americans.”Senior journalist at BBC Verify, Shayan Sardarizadeh, too, called out online posts claiming Edward Crabtree as the man who tackled one of the Bondi Beach gunmen, saying that the false claim originated from a fake news website that pretends to be the genuine Australian digital outlet The Daily Aus. A similar Australian Financial Review report, dated December 15, 2025, debunked the fake name, stating, “…the website, called thedailyaus.world – not connected in any way to youth news website The Daily Aus – was registered by a user based (or pretending to be based) in Iceland on Sunday. (The Daily Aus founders Sam Koslowski and Zara Seidler said their readers had been in touch to alert them to the fake news site).”Although we could not yet independently find further details of the heroic bystander in the viral clip, we have reached out to journalists in Australia and will update this article once we receive a response.VerdictThe man who disarmed one of the shooters during the Bondi Beach firing was, as per media reports, Ahmed Al Ahmed, not Edward Crabtree. The false identification originated from an unreliable website riddled with factual errors, structural inconsistencies, and signs of AI-generated content.FAQs