Chilling ‘Saudi sisters’ honor of father’s murder prank: Dad vows to hunt down and ‘kill’ his daughter after she refuses to leave Australia and return to Saudi Arabia to marry his cousin

A controlling father sent his daughter photos of two Saudi women who were found mysteriously dead in their Sydney unit after she refused to return from Australia to get married.

The father asked his daughter in a text message if the photos scared her and threatened her: ‘I swear to God I will kill you, I will 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, south-west of the city, in June 2022. The sisters had fled the Saudi Arabia in 2015 with only $5,000 and his 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 were living in fear, having stayed with family in Saudi Arabia.

The sinister undertones of the case were used as a threat by another Saudi father, months after his death, 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

A horrible text mock

– You thought you wouldn’t get it! said the message. ‘Is the image scary?

‘It will come true, I swear to God I will kill you, I will bury you and no one will know, I will come soon and see you.

“This is your destiny and it will be at my own hands.”

The message was revealed when the Administrative Appeals Tribunal overturned a Home Office decision to deny the woman a protection visa.

In a separate ruling late last year, the court also granted the same visa to his three sisters and their mother.

The court had heard the older sister was raped shortly before leaving Saudi Arabia and believed she would be killed because she would not be 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 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 domineering Saudi father sent his daughter photos of two of his countrymen found dead in his Sydney unit after she refused to return from Australia for an arranged marriage.

She told Home Affairs that she faced a forced marriage to her cousin if she returned to Saudi Arabia, where she would be under the tutelage of her abusive father.

She also risked being the victim of an “honour killing” at the hands of her husband, father and other male relatives once they learned she had been sexually assaulted.

The woman testified under oath in court that her father had been violent and controlling towards her and her sisters all their lives.

He stabbed his mother and committed her to a mental institution in a 30-year campaign of physical, verbal and emotional abuse.

Saudi laws do not allow women to divorce their husbands or 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 he returned to Saudi Arabia, ruling that she met the criteria to be declared a refugee and was granted a protection visa.

The deaths of the Alsehli sisters will be examined by a coroner but there were claims, yet to be proven at a coronial trial, that some senior police officers believed they had made a suicide pact after their Saudi family interrupted them.

The couple appeared to have remained locked 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 in 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 his (family) that stopped in February,” a source told the Daily Telegraph.

“Now, we don’t know why he stopped, but it seems there had been some kind of conflict with his family overseas. After that, they cut off communications with everyone.’

The sisters, who shared a black BMW coupe, received a final payment of more than $4,400 from the family in Saudi Arabia on February 3.

Amaal, who handled the funds, put $960 toward her biweekly rent and then transferred $2,000 to her sister.

Their letting agent, Jay Hu, revealed that the women had originally been “good” tenants when they took out a tenancy two years earlier and had evidence of “extensive” savings before falling behind on their rent at the start of 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 deputies came to evict them in June, they found the two bodies in separate rooms in 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 in Canterbury.

Police found no evidence that the girls were being followed by a private investigator, as several of their friends had suggested.

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 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 in Australia legally and have valid grounds for seeking asylum.

In her 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.

Reports in Middle Eastern newspapers at the time of the shocking discovery said the sisters had renounced Islam.

The bodies of Amaal and Asra were returned to the Saudi kingdom in August 2022.