The Full Story: Saudi sisters found dead & duct taped together in Hudson River, USA

The Saudi Arabian sisters whose duct taped-together bodies washed up in the Hudson River last week, were alive when they entered the water and had not been dead long, it has emerged.

Tala Farea, 16, and Rotana Farea, 22, were found on October 24 on Manhattan's Upper West Side. Their bodies were found at Riverside Park near the pier at 71st street. At first, police said the pair may have jumped from the George Washington Bridge in a suicide pact but that theory was scuppered by the fact that neither body showed any sign of trauma. They had been taped together face to face, with their arms outstretched so that together the bodies made the shape of a cross. On Wednesday, the medical examiner said the girls were alive when they entered the water but they have not been able to give further details about the way they died.
They refused to give the cause of death and police have not indicated when the examiner is likely to release their report. Their bodies were not decomposed when they were spotted by a bystander, leading investigators to believe they had not been dead long. NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said they were continuing to 'unravel' what happened in the months before the girls' deaths. ' I think we've made significant progress in piecing together pieces of this puzzle to find out what happened,' he said. He added that interviews being carried in Virginia 'are really unraveling, in some way, a piece of the puzzle of behind the scenes.'

On October 23, a day before the were found, the girls' mother Wafa'a received a phone call from an official at the Saudi Arabian consulate who ordered the entire family to return to their home country. The AP reported that it was in response to an application by the two sisters for political asylum in the United States. A Saudi Arabian spokesman at the embassy in Washington DC however told Arab News that that was not true. 'Any/All communication with the mother had nothing to do with a supposed asylum claim,’ they said. The sisters parents, Wafa'a and Abdulsalam, live in Virginia with their brothers who are 18 and 11.

Abdulsalam often traveled back to Saudi Arabia for work but no information about his job has emerged. In August, the family reported 16-year-old Tala missing after she disappeared from Virginia but the search was called off when they learned she had gone to stay with her sister in New York City. She had recently been awarded a spot at a top private school in Saudi Arabia with a full scholarship but was desperate not to go.

It was the second time they broke off from the family.

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