This Indian Uber driver helped save lives at Bondi. Now he’s able to call Sydney home

An Indian Uber driver who tended to victims of the Bondi Beach shooting has been granted permanent residency by the Australian government.

Since 2022, Rahemath Pasha, 37, had been living in Sefton, in south-western Sydney, while studying at a Parramatta culinary school and driving for Uber on the weekends. On December 14 last year, he’d dropped off a passenger at Bondi Beach when he’d heard gunshots ring out, initially thinking they were fireworks. He thought to FaceTime his daughter, who is still in India.

But the reality of being witness to Australia’s worst terror attack soon became clear. Pasha, with his car boot open from a passenger who had loaded luggage in before running away in panic, remembers parking his car and racing towards those injured. He’d spend the next few hours helping move people on stretchers into ambulances and hugging those who were lying on the grass.

“People were crying, and people were raising their hands for help, so I [couldn’t] resist myself,” he said. “I was talking to the victims, comforting them. I’m trying to do whatever I can.”

Now Pasha, originally in Australia on a student visa, will be allowed to stay in the country for life after intervention by immigration minister Tony Burke, according to official documents seen by the Herald. Bourke’s office and Home Affairs declined to comment.

Pasha was in April granted a subclass 151 visa, and his wife and three children – two daughters and a son – are now filing their own applications to come to Australia. He has been visiting his family in India for the past month and will return to Sydney this month. His family will need to wait until their visas are approved, a process Pasha has been told could take a year.

“They are really, really excited to come over to Australia,” he said. “Whenever I visited India from Sydney, I used to ask [my daughter], ‘Okay, tell me darling: what do you want me to bring from Australia? Do you want any dolls, any Barbies, any gifts, any teddies, all that?’ She used to tell me: ‘Nothing, Dad. I just want to come there and be with you.’”

Pasha has been diagnosed with severe PTSD. He said he was grateful to the government for providing a counsellor who “helped me a lot to come out from the trauma”, and for the chance to establish a new life in Sydney. He is now a trained chef, but Bondi changed his view on life. “I want to take a job where I can serve people,” he said.

“I have seen the green grass turning … red on that day, taking so many innocent lives,” he said. “I can still feel at nighttime: people are still calling me for help, and it’s really very bad, and now it’s been almost more than six months now. So [to] date, every night whenever I go to bed, I won’t go bed without praying for them.

“I pray for them. Like, ‘God help them. Help them to forget that incident and help them to recover as soon as possible.’”

Pasha is Muslim, and from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad – the same city from which accused gunman Sajid Akram hailed. The city made headlines in the immediate aftermath of the attack as the world’s media sought to trace Akram’s history.

“No religion will teach you to harm anyone, you know? Not even Christianity, not even … Islam, not even any religion. No one teaches you to harm anyone,” he said.

“I have been raised with that religion only, and I have always been taught from my religion [to] always help people. In Islam, it says that if you save one human, it’s like you have saved the whole humanity.”