Convicted murderer Brian Steven Smith. (Photo: YouTube)When Brian Smith, who is originally from South Africa, was applying for United States citizenship in 2019, he said he had never been involved in murdering, torturing, or sexually assaulting anyone.
He received citizenship, but it turned out he had lied.
In February 2024, Smith was convicted of murdering two Alaska Native women who were considered vulnerable, Kathleen Jo Henry and Veronica Abouchuk.
/file/attachments/orphans/alaska-convict-caryn1_433997.jpg "Kathleen Henry is one of two women murdered by South African Brian Smith in the US. (Photo: Supplied / Source)")
He was also convicted of sexual misconduct, tampering with evidence, and torture, some of which was filmed.
These killings happened between 2018 and early 2019, which means that Smith lied about not having broken any law when he applied for US citizenship later in the latter year.
He is currently serving a 226-year prison sentence in the US.
Smith has since claimed he was forced into confessing to the killings.
Unlawful US citizenship conviction
The issue of his status in the US resurfaced this week.
On Wednesday, 21 October 2026, Smith was convicted of unlawfully obtaining US citizenship. This is in addition to the murder convictions from 2024.
The latest guilty finding against Smith has dredged up other issues, including his coercion claims and previous concessions to Alaskan police officers, which saw him essentially confessing to a killing, accepting there was overwhelming evidence against him, and telling them that he had a racist alter ego on Facebook.
A US Attorney’s Office statement released Wednesday after his conviction summed up the case against him.
It said: “Smith falsely responded under oath to questions asking if he had been involved in torturing, killing, badly hurting, or sexually assaulting someone, and if he had ever committed, assisted in committing, or attempted to commit a crime he was not arrested for in the course of his naturalization proceedings.
“Smith responded ‘No’ to these questions. At the time of his application, Smith had committed related crimes, including but not limited to two murders that involved torture and sexual assaults.”
He is expected to be sentenced in this case in February next year.
Smith “faces a maximum penalty of up to 20 years’ imprisonment and denaturalization following sentencing”.
The US, SA and the so-called ‘refugees’
The October 2026 conviction of Brian Smith, originally from South Africa, for lying to get US citizenship, has happened atop tensions between the two countries.
Smith appears to have previously made racist remarks online, which aligns with tensions that heated up in February 2025 when US President Donald Trump signed an executive order that stated, in part: “The United States shall promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees escaping government-sponsored race-based discrimination, including racially discriminatory property confiscation.”
The reference to “race-based discrimination” was not based on fact.
The South African government responded: “It is ironic that the executive order makes provision for refugee status in the US for a group in South Africa that remains amongst the most economically privileged, while vulnerable people in the US from other parts of the world are being deported and denied asylum despite real hardship.”
This means he could lose his US citizenship after he hears what punishment he faces for having lied to obtain it.
According to the publication, the Anchorage Daily News, Michael Heyman, the US Attorney for the District of Alaska, said it was too early to determine whether Smith would be deported, but if this happened, it would probably be after he had served his prison term.
Another Alaskan news report said that an order revoking Smith’s US citizenship could take effect after his sentencing. A separate immigration hearing would be required for his potential deportation.
Coercion claims and memory card
The Anchorage Daily News report said that Smith had represented himself in court in the citizenship saga and had claimed that police had forced him into confessing to the murders of Henry and Abouchuk.
Daily Maverick has reported that US police took a deeper look at Smith after a resident in Anchorage contacted officers because she had found an SD card containing footage of a murder.
It was later reported, though, that a woman had stolen Smith’s cellphone and copied the footage on to the memory card when she realised what it was – this led to the killings sometimes being referred to in the media as the “memory card murders”.
/file/attachments/orphans/alaska-convict-caryn2_458579.jpg "Veronica Abouchuk was killed by Brian Smith. (Photo: Supplied / Source)")
In apparent audio from the footage, aired on the US network Court TV, a man with a South African accent and a voice that sounds like Smith’s can be heard repetitively saying, in a sing-song voice: “You live. You die.”
The man also says: “Sadly, in my movies, everyone dies.”
Smith was believed to be one of only a handful of South Africans living in that part of Alaska, which added weight to the footage as evidence against him.
The footage was linked to Henry’s murder – her remains were found near a highway in October 2019.
Abouchuk’s body had been found earlier, but was identified later.
‘Bad point in SA’
Smith seems to have left South Africa, where he was reportedly based in the Eastern Cape, to pursue a relationship that began online.
A 44-minute Court TV video feature on Smith, titled A Double Life: Brian Steven Smith — Interview With A Killer, provides some other insight into why he left his home country.
In an interview with the presenter, Smith said: “In South Africa, things actually got to a bit of a bad point.
“I got into a business deal that just went sour and I lost a lot of money.”
Smith felt that he had nothing to lose by leaving South Africa.
His trip to Alaska was the first time he had travelled to another country.
During the Court TV interview, while referring to his experience of Alaska, Smith said: “It’s very similar to Africa. You’ve got the civilised and then you’ve the, the, whole ethnic, rural indigenous side of things.”
He added that he felt “uncomfortable around too many white people” and found himself “bonding closer” with “Alaskan natives”.
The Court TV feature included footage of police officers interviewing Smith in 2019.
Racist alter ego
During that interview, an officer asked Smith if he had Facebook accounts other than one under his name, and Smith replied: “Oh yes, yah, I’ve got one called Bradley Phillips […]
“He’s like my alter ego. He’s racist, you know, he can make racist jokes and stuff like that.”
Daily Maverick has reported that an individual with the same name, Brian Smith, who said he lived in Alaska and had been in South Africa from 1971 to 2013, was once active on the online Quora platform – a question-and-answer-style website.
One of many questions Smith replied to was: “Are there poor white communities in South Africa?”
His response was: “Most whites are poor. I grew up poor. While the blacks got free housing and free education and free medical, the whites have to pay. This kept whites poor.”
A reply to a question about whether “you faced racism in your life” read: “I am a white male. I face racism every day. I am blamed for things I could never have done. I am punished for things that never happened. I have to pay tax to feed lazy people.”
Trump’s executive order
Smith’s conviction for unlawfully obtaining his US citizenship and facing potential deportation has happened amid tensions between the US and South Africa.
Some of the tensions relate to US President Donald Trump’s February 2025 signing of an executive order cutting off aid to this country and offering refugee status to Afrikaners “who are victims of unjust racial discrimination”.
The order also claimed that an expropriation law was “to enable the government of South Africa to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation”.
President Cyril Ramaphosa met Trump in the White House in 2025, when the US president again made false claims of genocide committed against white Afrikaners in South Africa.
That is ostensibly why Trump has encouraged white Afrikaners to relocate to the US – where Smith is now jailed after being convicted of two murders, and where he lied to get citizenship. DM
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