In this work, a novel optimal multiuser detection (MUD) approach, which not only achieves the optimal maximum-likelihood (ML)-like performance but also has reasonably low computational complexity, for Space-time coded OFDM (ST-OFDM) systems is presented. In the proposed detection scheme, the signal model is firstly re-expressed into linearly equivalent one. Then, with the linearly equivalent signal model, a new jointly MUD algorithm is proposed to detect signals. The ML-like bit-error-rate (BER) performance and reasonably low complexity of the proposed detection are verified by computer simulations.