A Lebanese man whose children were allegedly abducted by their Australian mother in a suburb of Beirut on Wednesday with the apparent involvement of a network television crew before being arrested, will not press charges against his estranged wife, he told the Guardian in an interview.

Ali al-Amin, a surfing instructor living in the southern suburb of St Therese, said he was shocked by the attempted kidnapping of the children, but he was not angry at his partner for attempting to take, Lahela, six, and Noah, four, back to Australia.

Australian TV crew wanted to show kidnapping as 'a good thing': Beirut police Read more

Amin, speaking at home with his two children, who appeared to be in good health, said: “I told her that I’m not going to file anything. She is the mother of my children.”

He added: “I saw her and I was thinking, ‘oh what did you do, what were you thinking?’ I wasn’t angry, I was disappointed. You could have just showed up and said you wanted to see the kids. She knows that. But then again, she is a mother.”

More details emerged on Friday of the family drama that led to Amin’s departure from Australia with the children, his decision not to bring them back to Australia where the mother, Sally Faulkner, was living, and her subsequent alleged attempt to smuggle them out of Lebanon by boat after operatives reportedly seized them while they waited for their school bus in a suburb south of Beirut.

Police sources in Lebanon said the team suspected of trying to kidnap the children were accompanied by members of a Nine Network television crew that they said was in Lebanon to film the operation, having publicised the case on the channel’s A Current Affair programme in recent months.

The Guardian interviewed Amin as well as a close friend of Faulkner, who approached the newspaper and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Their accounts are different, but both agreed that Faulkner had acted out of desperation to see her children. “I have the feeling that Sally on the night was detached from reality a bit – just so in love with her children and so happy to see them and hold them at last,” Faulkner’s friend said.

But the family drama also brought to the fore the inadequacies of family law in the Middle East and Lebanon – estranged, foreign mothers often have little recourse through the courts to challenge a father’s custody.

Amin and his mother, Ibtissam Berri, detailed what happened on the day of the alleged kidnapping. Amin, who owns a surfing school in Beirut, received a message on his phone requesting that he attend to a group of American surfers that morning, so his mother walked Lahela and Noah to the bus stop for their ride to school.

When they reached the bus stop, Berri said, the door of a car nearby opened and a man with a camera emerged, along with a group of men who snatched the children away and pushed her to the ground, before speeding away in a Hyundai. The news reached Amin as he was arriving at the surfing club.

“I was shaking,” he said. “My mind was racing at a hundred thoughts a second.”

It helped that Amin apparently knew of a plan to kidnap the children. He said he had access to his wife’s emails until last December, and had taken screenshots of emails discussing the outlines of the plan, which allowed local police to identify the suspects, including a British man who was in a yacht on Beirut’s waterfront that was allegedly intended to ship the children away to nearby Cyprus, where they would apply for new passports with the Australian embassy.

He also knew that Faulkner was in Beirut – security officers who knew the family alerted him that she had passed through nearby checkpoints. St. Therese has a high security presence as two years ago it was the scene of an assassination of a senior Hezbollah official, Hassan Lakkis.

“I had access to Sally’s emails so I knew the plan, but I didn’t think they would be that ballsy,” said Amin. “We’re in a strictly tight security area, and they know. I thought maybe she just wanted to take a look at them and wanted to approach me and talk, to say ‘let’s sit down and just talk’. It was insane.”

Faulkner’s friend claimed she had attempted repeatedly and fruitlessly to contact Amin and the children over the past few months.

The couple’s troubles appear to have begun in 2013, when they lived in Beirut. A spate of suicide bombings linked to the Syrian war prompted Amin to move the family to Australia while he carried on with running the surfing school in Beirut. When he visited the following January, he said, Faulkner told him that she wanted a separation, though they never officially divorced.

During the next two years, he travelled back and forth to spend time with the family, spending the summer months in Beirut. In May last year, he took the children with him on a trip to Lebanon, and over a series of Skype calls told his wife that they would not be returning to Australia.

“You dropped us off at the airport with our packed bags, border security called you, so you knew we were leaving,” he said. “I didn’t kidnap them. They’re as much my kids as yours.”

Amin, who met with Faulkner on Friday in detention with the Lebanese Internal Security Forces, said he had decided they couldn’t go back because he wanted them to be raised in a tightly-knit and extended family, rather than a looser structure in Australia. “She’s their mother, but I’m not a bad father,” he said. “To me they’re everything.”

Amin’s account is contested by Faulkner’s friend, who said the mother had only consented to a three week holiday.

“He Skyped her when they arrive in Lebanon saying they’re not coming back,” the friend said. “They have some more Skype conversations in which the children are crying desperately for their mother, then he cuts all contact – stops two babies seeing or hearing their mother who they had always been with. She tried every route to contact him, desperate to hear them on their birthdays or Christmas. This is what he did to the children he claims to have the best interests of at heart. Emotional devastation for children so small.”

Amin reserved his anger for the team that had allegedly orchestrated the kidnapping, including the Nine Network team, who remained in custody on Friday, as well as what he described as racism in the coverage of the family drama.

“They’re trying to paint me that I took the kids because my name is Ali, like I took the kids to Isis to train them,” he said. “Arab, Muslim, it was there, I thought it was the Donald Trump campaign for a minute.

“The media in Australia is bullcrap,” he added. “To hire mercenaries to come and kidnap your kids? How horrible are you guys? You’re endangering everyone’s lives including my mother and the kids, for what? For a story?”