Saudi sisters’ deaths in New York ruled suicide
New York medical examiner says sisters bound themselves together, descended into river
Manama: The two Saudi sisters whose bodies washed up at the edge of the Hudson River in New York in October had committed suicide, US medical officials have said. The bodies were bound together with duct tape around the waists and ankles.
Speculation mounted about the cause of the death of Tala Farea, 16, and Rotana Farea, 23, who had disappeared about two months earlier.
“Today, my office determined that the death of the Farea sisters was the result of suicide, in which the young women bound themselves together before descending into the Hudson River,” Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said in a statement.
The causes of death of both were listed as drowning and the manner suicide.
According to local authorities, the two sisters had been living Manhattan since September 1, shopping, ordering lavish meals and staying at luxury hotels until a credit card they were using maxed out.
They had been in the US about three years and reportedly wanted to stay there.
Relatives last year said the family moved to the US in 2015, so that their two girls and two sons could pursue their education.
They all lived with their mother Wafa in the Virginia suburbs, while the father, Abdul Salam, travelled back and forth for work reasons.
When Rotana moved to New York to study, Tala became upset and decided to follow her elder sister without informing her mother who, not knowing where her daughter was, reported her missing in August.
However, as the police learned that Tala was with her sister, the search was called off.
Reports that the mother told detectives that on the day before the bodies were discovered, she received a call from an official at the Saudi embassy, ordering the family to leave the US because the daughters had applied for political asylum were dismissed by the embassy as “absolutely false.”