A knife-wielding attacker is believed to have forced two students to perform sex acts before they leaped from the third floor of an inner-city Sydney apartment.
Liao Wei, an 18-year-old Chinese woman and Chris Han, her 19-year-old Korean boyfriend, as well as two other women were held inside the Waterloo apartment on Sunday for more than an hour by the stranger, police said.
Neighbours called triple-0 after seeing the young couple fall naked some 25m from the balcony to the concrete surface below about 1.40pm (AEDT) Sunday.
Both were naked and police have not ruled out the possibility they were sexually assaulted or threatened with sexual assault prior to the fall.
A source was quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying the reason the pair were naked was because the attacker forced them to perform sex acts.
"They were forced to do sexual acts and then forced to jump off the balcony," the source was quoted as saying.
"That's why they were naked."
The man suffered two broken legs, a fractured pelvis and a fractured vertebrae and was taken to Sydney's Royal Prince Alfred Hospital where he remained in a stable condition on Monday.
"It's believed the deceased and the injured male were trying to get to the next level, from level three to level two, to try and get away from the offender," Superintendent Luke Freudenstein said.
He conceded the couple must have been "very fearful" to attempt the climb.
"We don't know precisely how the (intruder) got in, but we do believe that he followed the female in after she buzzed her way in," Supt Freudenstein said.
"We don't know what the motive was ... it could have been a robbery, and we really don't know how long the fellow may have been loitering around out the front."
Once through the security entrance of the unit block the intruder threatened the woman with a knife and followed her to the apartment where he forced his way inside.
"We believe it's opportunistic," Supt Freudenstein said.
"There's nothing to suggest he targeted those victims. There's nothing to suggest they know the victim."
Some 65 minutes passed before neighbours saw the couple trying to climb off the balcony.
"Something has happened in that unit to make them take that step, 25 metres above a footpath for them to try and climb, from our information, to the balcony beneath and unfortunately they haven't made it," Supt Freudenstein said.
After the fall, the intruder - described only as a man aged about 30 with a dark complexion - walked out of the apartment leaving the two other women uninjured.
They have undergone counselling and were helping detectives, Supt Freudenstein said.
"This is the first time in my career of 28 years that I've seen such a horrific incident," he said.
"(I've) never heard anything like this before. It's a tragedy, a situation where people have had to actually scale a balcony to get to their safety."
Both victims were "highly educated" and studying in readiness to attend university, he said.
Police are using Interpol services to try and contact the victims' relatives.
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