A controlling father sent his daughter pictures of two Saudi women who were mysteriously found dead in their Sydney unit after she refused to return from Australia for an arranged marriage.
The father asked his daughter in a text message if the photos scared her and threatened, ‘I swear to God I’m going to slaughter you, bury you and no one will know’.
The bodies of Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, 23, were located inside their Canterbury flat in the city’s south-west in June 2022. The sisters had fled Saudi Arabia in 2015 with just $5,000 and their remains were not discovered for two months.
Both women had active claims with Home Affairs seeking asylum at the time of their deaths and it was suggested they had been living in fear, having fallen out with their family in Saudi Arabia.
The sinister overtones of the case were used as a threat by another Saudi father, months after their deaths, when his daughter left the strict Islamic kingdom to study in Australia.
The unnamed woman, who was later joined by her mother and three younger sisters in Australia, defied her father’s demands to return to her homeland to marry a cousin.
The father sent his eldest daughter a text message in Arabic with photographs of the dead women.
Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, 23, (above) were found dead inside their Canterbury unit in the city’s south-west on June 7, 2022
Horrific text taunt
‘Did you think I wouldn’t reach you!’ the message said. ‘Is the picture scary?
‘It’s going to become real, I swear to God I’m going to slaughter you, bury you and no one will know, I’m coming soon and will see you.
‘This is your fate and its going to be with my own hands.’
The message was revealed when the Administrative Appeals Tribunal overturned a decision by Home Affairs to refuse a protection visa to the woman.
In a separate judgment delivered late last year the tribunal also granted the same visa to her three sisters and mother.
The tribunal had heard the eldest sister was raped shortly before leaving Saudi Arabia and believed she would be killed for not being a virgin when she married.
Born into a privileged family in Jeddah, her parents had separated while she was at school but her father retained a key to the family home and came and went as he pleased.
The woman first came to Australia on a student visa in July 2012, when she was accompanied by her father for about four months, and applied for a protection visa in 2015.
A controlling Saudi father sent his daughter pictures of two of her countrywomen found dead in their Sydney unit after she refused to return from Australia for an arranged marriage
She told Home Affairs she faced a forced marriage to her cousin if returned to Saudi Arabia, where she would be under the guardianship of her violent father.
She also risked becoming the victim of an ‘honour killing’ at the hands of her husband, father and other male relatives once they learnt she had been sexually assaulted.
The woman gave sworn testimony before the tribunal that her father had been violent and controlling towards her and her sisters all their lives.
He had stabbed their mother and had her committed to a psychiatric institution in a campaign of physical, verbal and emotional abuse waged over 30 years.
Saudi laws does not permit women to divorce their husbands or provide any penalty for men who assault their wives.
The tribunal accepted the woman’s evidence about her father’s behaviour and her fears of persecution if returned to Saudi Arabia, ruling she met the criteria for being declared a refugee and granted a protection visa.
The deaths of the Alsehli sisters will be examined by a coroner but there were claims – yet to be tested in a coronial process – that some senior police believed they had made a suicide pact after they were cut off by their Saudi family.
It appeared the pair had remained holed-up inside their flat from late February 2022 – shortly after they stopped receiving money – until early April when they died.
Asra Abdullah Alsehli (above) and her sister fled Saudi Arabia with just $5,000 and police believe they died as the result of a suicide pact two months before their remains were found
Toxicology reports – which were ultimately inconclusive – found unusual levels of sodium, nitrate and fluoride in the apartment.
‘There was a stream of money coming to them from their (family) that stopped in February,’ a source told The Daily Telegraph.
‘Now, we don’t know why it stopped, but it seems there had been some sort of a fall out with their family overseas. After that, they cut off communications with everybody.’
The sisters, who shared a black BMW coupe, received a final payment of more than $4,400 from family in Saudi Arabia on February 3.
Amaal, who was in charge of the funds, put $960 towards their fortnightly rent and then transferred $2,000 to her sister.
Their rental agent Jay Hu revealed the women had originally been ‘good’ tenants when they took a lease two years earlier and had proof of ‘ample’ savings before falling behind on rent in early 2022.
Police carried out three welfare checks on the sisters in the months before their deaths, as mail piled up outside their door.
When sheriff’s officers came to evict them in June, they located the two bodies in separate bedrooms of the first-floor unit.
Police carried out three welfare checks on the Alsehli sisters in the months before their deaths, as mail piled up outside their door in this block of flats at Canterbury
Police found no evidence the girls were being followed by a private investigator, as they had suggested to several of their friends.
Instead, sources with knowledge of the investigation believed the girls were aware of the dangers of returning to Saudi Arabia and decided to take their own lives.
After coming to Australia in 2017 the sisters lived for a period in the western Sydney suburb of Fairfield, which has a large Arabic-speaking community.
In 2022, they applied for subclass 866 protection visas which requires applicants to have legally arrived in Australia and have valid reasons for seeking asylum.
In their applications, Asra claimed to have been an atheist while Amaal said she was a lesbian.
Same-sex relationships and atheism are forbidden in Saudi Arabia, where the legal system is based on a strict interpretation of sharia law.
Reports published in Middle Eastern newspapers at the time of the shock discovery said the sisters had renounced Islam.
The bodies of Amaal and Asra were returned to the Saudi kingdom in August 2022.
***
Read more at DailyMail.co.uk