BBC eye investigation
When a prominent Saudi trans woman published their suicide note on X, her friends and followers were devastated. The note, which was watched by millions, said that the lawyer was in the US – where she was trying to ask for asylum – he persuaded to return home to family and country that would not accept her identity.
The BBC World Service identified this man as Bader Alomaira, who worked at the Saudi Arabian Embassy at Washington DC, suggests evidence. He is associated with controversial vomiting from the United States of several other Saudi students – including two later accused of committing murder during his stay at the University.
Mr. Aloomair did not respond to allegations raised in our investigation.
Eden Knight was from one of the most respected families of the Middle Eastern Kingdom. After moving to Virginia in 2019 at the Saudi Government Scholarship to study at George Mason University, Eden made the decision in early 2022 to cross from presentation as a man to present to a woman, carrying women’s clothes and taking women’s sex hormones.
Eden found the community on X and Discord where she felt accepted and began to grow next online. In one post, she shared a picture of her Saudi ID of photography next to her new female look, and the post became viral.
Since the transgender person in Saudi Arabia is neither society nor a government – we spoke with several transgender Saudis, who now live outside the kingdom, who have told us about harassment, and in some cases they have experienced violence.
Return to Saudi Arabia, so it could be difficult for Eden. We understand that her student visa expired at the time of her viral tweet, so she decided to look for asylum to the US to stay there permanently.
Eden said that he had sent her an old friend who had contacted her with American private investigator Michael Pocalyk. He offered to help her claim about Asylum and repair the relationship with her family – according to another friend Hayden, with whom Eden lived in Georgia at the time.
Other friends shared messages with us from Eden, who said Mr. Pokalyko told her that she should move from Georgia to Washington DC to submit her claim.
According to the final message she published on X, at the end of October 2022, a private investigator welcomed Eden from a train in the US capital. He was accompanied by a Saudi lawyer named Bader, she wrote.
“I was honestly optimistic and I believed that could succeed,” Eden said in her last post. She said Bader put her in a beautiful apartment near Washington DC, she looked at.
But over time, it seems that she began to question his motives. Eden wrote to friends, in the messages that were shared with the BBC, that Bader was “Detronesion”. She told them Bader tried to throw out all the women’s clothes and told her to stop hormone therapy.
Eden also told his friends that Bader advised her that she could not apply for asylum in the USA -that she had to return to Saudi Arabia to do so. An American immigration expert said that such advice would be incorrect.
In December 2022. Eden sent friends to say, “I go [back to Saudi] With a lawyer and want the best. “Her suicide note on X makes it clear that a lawyer in question is someone called” Bader “.
Shortly afterwards, Eden told friends that the return was a mistake.
She told them to say that her parents had taken her passport and the government instructed her to close her X account. Eden told friends that they had evidence that her parents hired people to return her to Saudi Arabia, though she had never shared that evidence.
“The lawyer who assisted me in Asylum worked with my parents behind my back,” she said to one of them.
Over the next few months, Eden’s friends say, she lost all hope that she would escape in Saudi Arabia.
She worked in a junior position at a technological company and took over her original male identity in the public. Eden sent a friend to say that he was trying to continue taking women’s hormones, but that their parents had repeatedly seized them. Eden told her friends that she had suffered constantly verbal abuse and sent friends to the video – which we saw – that she had secretly recorded a family member shouting that her western ideas were washed with her brain.
Eden took his own life on March 12, 2023.
We wanted to find “Bader” – the lawyer Eden accused of belittling her and persuading her home to ask him more about the events that started her death.
We asked for the lawyers of that name in the DC area, and one came: Bader Alomair. There were limited data on the network, but the outdated directors for professionals working in Riyadh gave his full name in Arabic – which in turn led us to an inactive Facebook account showing his photo on the Harvard Law School.
In the texts Eden sent to friends, she mentioned that her lawyer was educated at Harvard.
The source then shared a key photo of Eden taken from the apartment, Mr Alomair installed. We managed to geolle it into a residential block on the Washington DC periphery.
One person there told us that he knew Eden and saw her with Mr. Aloomair.
He said Eden owned women’s clothes, jewelry and makeup, but would have to hide her when Mr. Alomair came. He made her hair and told her not to shave, the witness said.
We repeatedly tried to contact Mr. Aloomair, but he did not answer. When we visited the address listed on his registration of DC Bar, we saw a man who fits his photos as he enters SUV and drives.
We followed, noticing the unusual car numbers – his code indicated that the car had issued a Saudi Arabic Embassy in Washington, and that the vehicle owner was the Embassy staff.
The role of Mr. Alomaira at the Embassy was to support Saudi students in the US – a lawyer who had worked with him had previously told us.
We have discovered articles in the news that emphasizes the cases of Mr Alomaira who help those who left Hurricanes in Florida. But we also found that his help had spread to more controversial situations.
On October 13, 2018, US police questioned two Saudi students for the death of an ambitious rapper in North Carolina – stabbed, allegedly after an altercation with a couple.
Some two months later, Abdullah Hariri and Sultan Alsuhaymi were accused of murder, but until then they left the US.
Just four days after the stitch, Mr. Hariri was on the flight back to Saudi Arabia, suggesting e -mail shared with us. Includes details about the house of flights that told us that our source Mr. Alomair was organized for Mr. Hariri and for Mr. Alsuhaymi.
No student has ever publicly commented on the case.
Mr. Aloomair sent an invoice for flights a month later, another e -mail is shown, for which our source says he should get him compensation from the Saudi Embassy.
Another source says he worked with him to present dozens of other Saudi students in the US against accusations ranging from too fast driving to driving drinks.
“Bader would come to meetings with the Arabic form, led by the Saudi embassy to sign students to sign [which] Promised to return legal fees to the Saudi government after returning home. “
The source told us that students would appear at their first hearing, but they disappear before any subsequent hearing, although we do not know if Mr. Alomair had any role in it.
In 2019, the FBI warned that Saudi officials probably made it easier to escape Saudi citizens from US legal proceedings.
“The FBI estimates that the officials of the Saudi Arabian Kingdom are almost certainly assisted by American Saudi citizens to avoid legal issues, undergoing US court proceedings. This assessment is made with great confidence.”
The sources told us that Mr. Alomair still lives and works in the US. He owns more commercial real estate around Washington DC, and in August 2024 it seems he founded a new law firm in Virginia, where he is appointed partner.
Michael Pocalyko, Bader Alomair and Saudi Embassy at Washington did not answer our questions.
We contacted Eden’s family to ask if they wanted to participate in this story, but they did not answer.
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