The lawyer in the suicide note of Saudi students had embassy links

When a prominent Saudi woman published her suicide note in X, her friends and followers were devastated. The note, seen by millions, said that a lawyer in the United States, where he had been trying to claim asylum, had persuaded her to return to a family and a country that would not accept her identity.

The World BBC service has identified this man as Bader Alomair, who has worked at the Saudi Arabia Embassy in Washington DC, suggests evidence. It is linked to the controversial yields of the United States of several other Saudi students, including two later accused of committing murders during their university.

Alomair has not responded to the accusations raised in our investigation.

Eden Knight was one of the most respected families in the Middle East kingdom. After moving to Virginia in 2019 in a scholarship of the Saudi Government to study at the George Mason University, Eden made the decision in early 2022 to make the transition to present himself as a man to present himself as a woman, wearing women’s clothes and taking female sex hormones .

Eden found a community in X and Discord where he felt accepted and the following online began to grow. In a publication, he shared a photo of his Saudi identification photo with his new female look and the publication went viral.

Being transgender in Saudi Arabia is not tolerated by society or government: we have spoken with several transgender Saudi, which now live outside the kingdom, who told us about harassment and, in some cases, violence, had experienced.

Therefore, returning to Saudi Arabia could have been difficult for Eden. We understand that his student’s visa expired at the time of his viral tweet, so he decided to look for asylum in the United States to stay there permanently.

Eden said she was sent by a message by an old friend who put her in touch with an American private researcher Michael Pocalyko. He offered to help with his asylum claim and repair the relationship with his family, according to another friend, Hayden, with whom Eden lived in Georgia at that time.

Other friends have shared messages with us from Eden, who say Mr. Pocalyko told him that he needed to move from Georgia to Washington DC to file his claim.

According to the final message he published in X, at the end of October 2022, the private investigator met Eden out of the train in the capital of the United States. He was accompanied by a Saudi lawyer named Bader, he wrote.

“It was really optimistic and believed that this could work,” Eden said in his final publication. She said Bader put her in a beautiful apartment near Washington DC and tourism was made.

But over time it seems that she began to question her motives. Eden wrote to friends, in messages shared with the BBC, which Bader was “stopping.” She told them that Bader tried to throw all her female clothes and told her to stop hormonal therapy.

Eden also told his friends that Bader advised him that he could not request asylum in the United States and that he must return to Saudi Arabia to do this. An immigration expert from the United States said that this advice would be incorrect.

In December 2022, Eden sent a message to friends to say: “I go (back to Saudi) with a lawyer and wishing the best.” His suicide note about X makes it clear that the lawyer in question was someone called “Bader.”

He didn’t spend much time before Eden told his friends to return was a mistake.

He sent them a message so that his parents had taken his passport and the government had ordered him shared that evidence.

“The lawyer who was helping me with asylum was working with my parents behind my back,” he told one of them.

In the coming months, Eden’s friends say, he lost any hope of escaping Saudi Arabia.

He worked in a Junior position in a technology company and in public assumed his original male identity. Eden sent a message to a friend to tell her that she was trying to continue taking female hormones, but that her parents repeatedly confiscated them. Eden told his friends that he suffered a constant verbal abuse and sent friends a video, which we have seen, who secretly recorded a family member shouting that Western ideas had washed her brain.

Eden took his life on March 12, 2023.

We wanted to find “Bader”, the lawyer Eden accused of detecting and persuading his house, to ask him more about the events that come to his death.

We are looking for lawyers of that name in the DC area, and one appeared: Bader Alomair. There was limited information about him online, but an obsolete directory for professionals who worked at Riyad Harvard

In the text messages Eden sent his friends, he mentioned that his lawyer had been educated in Harvard.

Then, a source shared a crucial photo, taken by Eden from the apartment that Alomair had installed it. We were able to geolocate it to a residential block on the outskirts of Washington DC.

A person there told us that he knew Eden and that he had seen her with Mr. Alomair.

He said Eden owned women’s clothes, jewelry and makeup, but he would have to hide it when he approached Mr. Alomair. He made her cut her hair and told her not to shave, said the witness.

We repeatedly try to contact Mr. Alomair, but he did not respond. When we visited the address that appears in the record of his DC bar, we saw a man who coincides with photos of him to get into a SUV and move away.

We continue, pointing out the unusual car registration plate: its code indicated that the car was issued by the Saudi Arabia Embassy in Washington DC, and that the owner of the vehicle was the Personal of the Embassy.

Alomair’s role in the embassy was to support Saudi students in the United States, a lawyer who previously worked with him said.

We discovered news articles that highlighted the cases of Mr. Alomair helping those who left homeless for a hurricane in Florida, for example. But we also discovered that his help had spread to more controversial situations.

On October 13, 2018, the US police interrogated two Saudi students about the death of an aspiring rapper in North Carolina, stabbed, according to the reports, after an altercation with the couple.

About two months later, Abdullah Hariri and Sultan Alsuhaymi were accused of murder, but by then they had left the United States.

Only four days after the stabbing, Hariri was on a flight back to Saudi Arabia, suggests an email shared with us. It includes details of the flights home that our source told us that Mr. Alomair organized both for Hariri and Mr. Alsuhaymi.

None of the students have publicly commented on the case.

Alomair received an invoice for flights a month later, shows another email, which our source says that it would have needed to obtain a reimbursement of the Saudi embassy.

Another source says that he has worked with him to represent dozens of other Saudi students in the US. UU. Against the positions ranging from speed to driving.

“Bader would arrive at meetings with an Arab form headed by the Saudi Embassy so that the students sign (who) promised to pay legal fees to the Saudi government once they returned home.”

The source told us that the students would appear at their first audience, but they would disappear before any subsequent audience, although we do not know if Alomair had any role in this.

In 2019, the FBI warned that Saudi officials probably facilitated the escape of Saudi citizens of the legal procedures of the United States.

“The FBI evaluates that the officials of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia almost surely help Saudi citizens based in the United States to avoid legal problems, undermining the judicial process of the United States. This evaluation is carried out with great confidence.”

The sources have told us that Alomair continues to live and working in the United States. It has multiple commercial properties around Washington DC and in August 2024 seems to have established a new law firm in Virginia, where he is a partner appointed.

Michael Pocalyko, Bader Alomair and the Saudi Embassy in Washington DC did not answer our questions.

We contacted Eden’s family to ask if they wanted to participate in this story, but they did not respond.

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