NYPD: Checking if sisters found dead in Hudson were ordered home by Saudis
NYPD investigators are looking into a claim by the mother of two sisters found dead in the Hudson River last week had been ordered to return to their native Saudi Arabia because the girls had applied for asylum in the U.S., a law enforcement official said Monday.
The two sisters, 16 year-old Tala Farea and her sister Rotana Farea, 22, were found dead in the river on Wednesday afternoon, their bodies bound together with duct tape and no obvious signs of trauma, officials reported at the time.
Late Monday, detectives were poring over files detailing the family’s immigration status and were in contact with the Department of State, looking for any evidence that the dead sisters had applied for asylum, an NYPD spokesman said. The family first arrived in the U.S.in mid-2015, the spokesman added.
Both young women had initially been reported missing by their family in December 2017, at which time police in Fairfax, Virginia, determined that they were safe and living in an area homeless shelter, said the official who didn’t want to be identified.
For reasons which are still unclear, the sisters never returned to their family residence in Fairfax but instead, around August, again went missing until their bodies were found in the Hudson River. Virginia State Police put out a missing persons poster on one of the sisters but took it down when the bodies were found, said an agency spokeswoman.
Information about a request for the family to return to the Mideast added another element to a story which continues to be puzzling to investigators. Cops have speculated that the sisters may have feared being disciplined by their family for living in a shelter, as well as fears about what they faced if they were forced to return to Saudi Arabia.
NYPD officials have been leaning to the theory that the Farea sisters may have jointly committed suicide. But since the autopsy results were incomplete as of late yesterday, there is no official cause and manner of death listed, said a spokeswoman for the city medical examiner.
An NYPD spokesman on Monday discounted reports that the women may have jumped from the George Washington Bridge because surveillance cameras found no evidence of that. A fall into the Hudson from the bridge would also have caused trauma to the bodies, as well as shredded the duct tape binding the sisters together, said police. Investigators were looking for possible points of entry for the bodies on either side of the river, said the NYPD.
Police in Fairfax had been the lead agency in the missing person case. But yesterday officials there referred all calls to the NYPD. Officials at the Embassy for Saudi Arabia didn’t return telephone messages and emails for comment.
Anthony M. DeStefano has been a reporter for Newsday since 1986 and covers law enforcement, criminal justice and legal affairs from its New York City offices.
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