A Saudi Arabian international student at the University of NSW has allegedly been caught with 25,000 child abuse videos and images, some of children as young as two.
Ali Alghamdi, 35, a married father-of-two who is working part-time as an Uber driver while completing his PhD in optometry, was arrested at UNSW’s Randwick campus on Monday and charged with “use carriage service to access child abuse material”.
“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,” NSW Police said.
Alghamdi faced Waverley Local Court on Tuesday where he unsuccessfully applied for bail, The Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The court heard the student visa holder kept the alleged child abuse material on encrypted apps and had 650gb of material in one of his email addresses, and prosecutor Melanie Tam described the material as “significantly depraved … including children between two and four years old and infants”.
“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,” she told the court.
Magistrate Michael Barko told the court a strike force searched Alghamdi’s devices in 2022 and allegedly found videos of “the most perturbing child sexual abuse”.
“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,” he said.
But the PhD student’s lawyer Hisham Karnib told the court it was not known if his client was even in NSW at the time of the alleged offending.
Alghamdi will face court again in September.
Header image: Ali Alghamdi (UNSW).
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