Tunisian immigrant kills two daughters following custody dispute in US

American mother Amy Hunter arrived at a parking lot near her home in West Sacramento on New Year’s Eve to pick up her daughters, Sara, 9 and Sophie, 12, only to find them dying beside the corpse of their father.

The car was parked at the designated drop-off point for the girls, near West Sacramento’s City Hall in the US.

The victims’ parents had been involved in a custody battle for years, reported Sacramento Bee.

The two girls were later declared dead by West Sacramento Police in a murder-suicide by their father, Hamdy Rouin, 46, a Tunisian immigrant who was also found dead in the car.

The mother described her ex-husband Rouin as an abusive man and heavy drinker who had hit her, and threatened her to take the girls away to Tunisia, according to sacbee.com.

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The mother who converted to Islam, and other family and friends from her Islamic religious community gathered on Tuesday evening for a vigil where she lived with her little girls.

She filed for divorce in December 2014 and it was finalized in December 2016. Rouin was allowed supervised visits once a week with his girls after completing a court-ordered parenting class.

The father gradually got access to the girls and was allowed unsupervised visits as he was listed as having joint legal custody in a November 2016 document, while the mother retained sole physical custody.