Mystery deepens as police name Saudi sisters found dead in Sydney unit

Two Saudi Arabian sisters lay dead in their Canterbury unit for weeks before anyone found them. On the morning of June 17, a building manager requested a welfare check on Asra Abdullah Alsehli, 24, and Amaal Abdullah Alsehli, 23. Police arrived at 9:30 am and discovered both women in separate beds. They had been dead for what detectives would later describe as "some time"—a clinical phrase that masked the reality that decomposition had already set in, complicating every effort to understand what had happened to them.

The sisters had arrived in Australia from Saudi Arabia in 2017, five years before their bodies were found. They kept largely to themselves, according to Detective Inspector Claudia Allcroft, the officer leading the investigation. Police have declined to say what work they did or why they had left their home country, details that might have illuminated their lives in Sydney. Their family remains in Saudi Arabia, and police have maintained contact with them as the investigation stalled.

What makes the case unusual—the word police themselves used—is that nearly two months after the discovery, detectives still cannot say how the women died. Homicide and suicide remain on the table. A post-mortem examination was conducted, but the coroner's report and toxicology results have not yet been released. The decomposition of the bodies, which had been undisturbed for weeks, has made forensic analysis more difficult. "The bodies were there for some time, so that is problematic," Allcroft said. It was an understatement that captured the investigative bind: the longer a body remains undiscovered, the harder it becomes to read what killed it.

The timeline compounds the mystery. Police believe the women died in early May, meaning their bodies lay in the unit for six to seven weeks before the welfare check. A building manager had actually requested a check in mid-March after noticing food left out in common areas. When police responded then, the sisters "appeared fine," and no further action was taken. Whatever happened to them occurred in the weeks after that visit, in an apartment where two people lived quietly enough that their absence went unnoticed until decomposition became impossible to ignore.

Detectives have conducted extensive interviews with community members and neighbours, examined the apartment with forensic officers, and released photographs of the sisters in hopes of generating leads. They are now asking anyone who saw the women or knows about their movements in the days and weeks before their deaths to come forward. But as of late July, more than two months after their bodies were found, the investigation remained suspended in uncertainty. The coroner's report and toxicology results—the documents that might finally answer what happened—were still pending. Until those results arrive, the deaths of Asra and Amaal Alsehli remain officially unexplained.