How Saudi sisters Asra and Amaal Alsehli died: Their bare our bodies had been present in a suburban Sydney residence… Now it’s revealed what cops find out about mystifying case

Investigators believe two Saudi sisters who died under mysterious circumstances in their Sydney apartment had consumed a ‘suicide drink’ which can be bought online.

The naked bodies of Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, 23, were found inside their Canterbury flat in the city’s south-west in June 2022.

The sisters had fled Saudi Arabia in 2017 with just $5,000 and their remains were not discovered for at least a month after they died in separate rooms.

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 the Islamic kingdom.

A police source told the Daily Mail detectives had reached the conclusion the sisters took their own lives in the $480-a-week unit.

‘We believe that they drank a suicide drink together and that’s what killed them,’ the source said.

‘The substance takes the oxygen out of your blood and causes sudden death. It could be ordered online off the dark web.

‘They were there for a long time and weren’t in a good condition when they were found.’

The Daily Mail has chosen not to disclose the ingredients or any further detail about the substance the sisters are believed to have consumed.

This publication revealed earlier this year that the long-running coronial investigation into the sisters’ deaths was so complex it had been transferred from police to the Crown Solicitor’s Office.

A spokesman for the NSW Coroner’s Court said a brief review of the case was conducted on February 9 and the file passed to State Coroner Teresa O’Sullivan but no hearing date had yet been set.

For most cases heard in the court the coroner is assisted by a police prosecutor with specialised training in such matters.

Police told Ms O’Sullivan the Alsehli investigation was ‘too big’ for an individual advocate and referred it to the Crown Solicitor’s Office.

There have been claims – yet to be tested in the coronial process – that police believed the siblings made a suicide pact after they were cut off by their family.

It appeared the pair had remained holed-up inside the flat from shortly after they stopped receiving money from Saudi Arabia in late February 2022 until they died, perhaps in early May.

Toxicology reports – which were initially inconclusive – recorded unusual levels of sodium, nitrate and fluoride in the apartment.

The sisters, who shared a black BMW coupe, had 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, paid their $960 fortnightly rent and then transferred $2,000 to her sister.

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 on June 7, they located the two bodies in separate bedrooms of the unit.

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.

They enrolled at a local TAFE and worked as traffic controllers.

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 stated the sisters had renounced Islam.

An eerily similar case of two Saudi sisters who were found dead beside New York’s Hudson River in October 2018 was ruled by a medical examiner to have been the result of a suicide pact.

The bodies of Rotana Farea, 23 and Tala Farea, 16, were located bound together at the waist with duct tape after they had drowned.

There were reports at the time that the sisters, who had moved to the US several years earlier, were seeking asylum. As with the Alsehlis, police only ever released one picture of each of the Fareas.

The pair had last been seen by their family in Virginia in November 2017 and they had been reported missing from a ‘shelter-like facility’ in New York about two months before they died.

Financial records obtained by police showed the sisters had stayed at ‘a number of high-end hotels’ before their money started to run out.

The city’s chief of detectives Dermot Shea told reporters the women had made statements ‘they would rather inflict harm on themselves… than return to Saudi Arabia’.

Sources with knowledge of the Alsehli investigation have previously said they believed the young women were aware of the dangers of returning to Saudi Arabia and decided to take their own lives.

The sisters’ only known interaction with the Australian justice system occurred in 2018, when Asra filed an apprehended violence order application against a 28-year-old man. The matter was withdrawn in court the following year.

The bodies of Amaal and Asra Alsehli were returned to Saudi Arabia in August 2022.

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