A controlling father sent his daughter photographs 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 inside their apartment in Canterbury, in the south-west of the city, in June 2022. The sisters had fled Saudi Arabia in 2015 with only $5,000 and his remains were not discovered for a long time. two months.
Both women had active asylum claims with Home Affairs 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 undertones 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 south-west of the city on June 7, 2022.
Horrible text mockup
‘You thought I wouldn’t reach you!’ the message said. ‘Is the image scary?
‘It’s going to become real, I swear to God that I’m going to slaughter you, bury you and no one will know, I’ll come soon and see you.
“This is your destiny and it will be with my own hands.”
The message was revealed when the Administrative Appeals Court overturned a decision by the Ministry of the Interior to deny the woman a protection visa.
In another ruling handed down late last year, the court also granted the same visa to his three sisters and his mother.
The court had heard that the older 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 kept the key to the family home and came and went as he pleased.
The woman first arrived in 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 photographs of two of his compatriots found dead in their Sydney unit after she refused to return from Australia for an arranged marriage.
He told Internal Affairs that he faced a forced marriage to his cousin if he returned to Saudi Arabia, where he would be under the guardianship of his violent father.
She was also at risk of becoming the victim of an “honor killing” at the hands of her husband, father and other male relatives once they learned she had been sexually assaulted.
The woman gave sworn testimony in court that her father had been violent and controlling towards her and her sisters their entire lives.
He had stabbed his mother and committed her to a psychiatric institution in a 30-year campaign of physical, verbal and emotional abuse.
Saudi laws do not allow women to divorce their husbands nor do they provide any punishment for men who assault their wives.
The court accepted the woman’s evidence about her father’s behavior and her fears of persecution if she returned to Saudi Arabia, ruling that she met the criteria to be declared a refugee and receive a protection visa.
The Alsehli sisters’ deaths will be examined by a coroner, but there were claims – yet to be proven in a coronial trial – that some senior police officers believed they had made a suicide pact after their Saudi family separated them.
It appeared that the couple had remained sheltered inside their apartment 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.
‘Now, we don’t know why he stopped, but it seems there was some kind of fight with his family abroad. After that, they cut off communication with everyone.
The sisters, who shared a black BMW coupe, received a final payment of more than $4,400 from a family in Saudi Arabia on February 3.
Amaal, who was in charge of the funds, allocated $960 to the biweekly rent and then transferred $2,000 to his sister.
Their letting agent, Jay Hu, revealed that the women had originally been “good” tenants when they rented two years earlier and had evidence of “ample” savings before falling behind on their rent in early 2022.
Police conducted three welfare checks on the sisters in the months before their deaths, as mail piled up outside their door.
When sheriff’s deputies 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 Canterbury block of flats.
Police found no evidence that a private investigator was following the girls, as they had suggested to several of their friends.
Instead, sources with knowledge of the investigation believed that the girls were aware of the dangers of returning to Saudi Arabia and decided to take their own lives.
After arriving in 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 require applicants to have arrived legally in Australia and have valid grounds for seeking asylum.
In her applications, Asra claimed to have been an atheist, while Amaal said she was a lesbian.
Same-sex relationships and atheism are prohibited 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 shocking discovery said that the sisters had renounced Islam.
The bodies of Amaal and Asra were returned to the Saudi kingdom in August 2022.