Cops on Wednesday released the first photos of the young Saudi sisters whose bodies were found duct-taped together on the bank of the Hudson River last week.
Rotana and Tala Farea washed ashore in a stretch of Riverside Park near West 68th Street on Oct. 24, one day after their mother told cops she received a call at her home in Fairfax, Virginia, from the Saudi Arabian Embassy stating that her daughters had applied for asylum, police sources said.
Investigators are still mystified by how and why Rotana, 22, and Tala, 16, made their way to New York from their adopted home in Virginia, as well as whether their demise was a bizarre suicide pact or something more sinister.
Neither woman’s body had immediately obvious signs of trauma, and after initially suspecting that the pair might have jumped from the George Washington Bridge, cops cooled on the theory Tuesday.
NYPD Chief of Detectives Dermot Shea said Wednesday that investigators had been in touch with the victims’ family, and felt they were finally close to shedding some light on the mysterious case.
“We’ve made significant progress in piecing together the pieces of this puzzle to find out what happened,” said Shea at an unrelated press briefing. “Those interviews [with relatives in Virginia] are really unraveling in some way a piece of the puzzle of, behind the scenes, what was going on in the two young ladies’ lives.”
The sisters’ mother had also told investigators she hadn’t seen Rotana and Tala since December 2017, when she reported them missing to local authorities, sources said.
Virginia cops eventually found them, but they went to go stay in a shelter, the location of which wasn’t disclosed by cops to the parents, sources said.
Tala was again reported missing in August 2018 by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, but the search was called off, according to the English-language ArabNews.com, after it was learned that she was visiting her older sister in New York.