A Chinese international student has stabbed his girlfriend to death before committing suicide by jumping from the balcony of their apartment building in Sydney.
The bodies of the Chinese nationals, both 21, were found at their high-rise complex in Burwood on Monday morning – the male, who was naked from the waist down, in a garden bed beneath their balcony and the female in the unit that they shared with a flatmate, who was also Chinese.
Both were students at the University of Sydney, which is working with NSW Police and the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, it was revealed on Tuesday.
University of Sydney vice-chancellor Mark Scott emailed students to offer support due to the “unsettling news”, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
“We are co-operating closely with the police who have advised that the identities of the individuals have not yet been formally confirmed. The police investigation is ongoing and the information I can share with you at this time is limited for that reason,” Mr Scott said.
According to the Daily Telegraph, detectives are investigating whether the dead woman was raped before she was murdered, since her boyfriend was found without pants on. His ankles were also shattered.
CCTV shows the pair having a verbal dispute in the early hours of Monday morning, and a friend of the murder victim told police she had told her boyfriend she wanted to leave him just days before he fatally stabbed her.
Police said neither of the deceased were known to them, and they had never interacted with the couple.
According to the 2021 Census, Burwood, in Sydney’s inner west, is 23.3% Australian-born, and just 4.9% give their ancestry as Australian. 49.8% have Chinese ancestry, 29.9% were born in China, 33.7% speak Mandarin at home, 10.6% speak Cantonese, and 49.7% are attending a tertiary education institution.
