A controlling father sent his daughter photos 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 will slaughter you, bury you and no one will know.”
The bodies of Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, 23, were found in their flat in Canterbury 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. two months.
Both women had active Home Office claims for asylum at the time of their deaths and it was suggested they were living in fear after falling out with their family in Saudi Arabia.
The sinister undertone of the case was used as a threat months after their deaths by another Saudi father 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 home country to marry a cousin.
The father sent his eldest daughter a text message in Arabic with photos of the dead women.
Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, 23, (above) were found dead in their unit in Canterbury in the city’s south-west on June 7, 2022.
Horrible text taunt
“Did you think I wouldn’t reach you!” the message said. ‘Is the photo scary?
“It’s going to become a reality, I swear to God I’m going to slaughter you, bury you and no one will know, I’ll come soon and see you.
“This is your fate and it will be my own.”
The message was revealed when the Administrative Appeals Tribunal overturned a Home Office decision to deny a protection visa to the woman.
In a separate judgment handed down late last year, the tribunal also granted the same visa to her three sisters and mother.
The tribunal heard that the eldest sister had been raped shortly before leaving Saudi Arabia and believed she would be killed because she was not a virgin when she married.
Born into a privileged family in Jeddah, her parents had separated while she was in school, but her father kept the keys 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 photos of two of her compatriots who were found dead in their Sydney unit after she refused to return from Australia for an arranged marriage
She told the Home Office that she faced a forced marriage to her cousin if she returned to Saudi Arabia, where she would be under the guardianship of her abusive father.
She was also at risk of being the victim of an “honor killing” by her husband, father and other male relatives once they learned she had been sexually abused.
The woman gave an affidavit to the tribunal that her father had been violent and controlling towards her and her sisters throughout their lives.
He had stabbed their mother and committed her to a mental institution in a thirty-year campaign of physical, verbal and emotional abuse.
Saudi laws do not allow women to divorce their husbands and do not provide any punishment for men who abuse their wives.
The tribunal accepted the woman’s evidence about her father’s behavior and her fear of persecution upon return to Saudi Arabia, ruling that she met the criteria to be declared a refugee and granted a protection visa.
The Alsehli sisters’ deaths will be investigated by a coroner, but there were claims – yet to be tested in a coronial trial – that senior police believed they had entered into a suicide pact after being cut off by their Saudi family.
The couple appeared to have locked themselves in 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 a 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 flow of money coming to them from their (family) that stopped in February,” a source told The Daily Telegraph.
‘We don’t know why it stopped, but it seems there was a fight with their family abroad. Then they cut off communication with everyone.”
The sisters, who shared a black BMW coupe, received a final payment of more than $4,400 from relatives in Saudi Arabia on February 3.
Amaal, who was responsible for the money, deposited $960 toward their biweekly rent and then transferred $2,000 to her sister.
Their rental agent Jay Hu revealed that the women were originally ‘good’ tenants when they signed a lease two years earlier and had proof of ‘sufficient’ savings before falling into rent arrears in early 2022.
Police conducted three welfare checks on the sisters in the months before their deaths as mail piled up on their doorstep.
When sheriff’s deputies came to evict them in June, they found 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 on their doorstep in this Canterbury apartment block.
Police found no evidence that 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 commit suicide.
After coming to Australia in 2017, the sisters lived for a period in Sydney’s western suburb of Fairfield, which has a large Arabic-speaking community.
In 2022, they applied for subclass 866 protection visas, which require applicants to have arrived in Australia legally and have valid reasons to claim asylum.
In their applications, Asra claimed to be an atheist, while Amaal said she was a lesbian.
Same-sex relationships and atheism are banned 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.