Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum – the daughter of UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – was last seen in public in March 2018 aboard a yacht off the coast of India before a raid by Indian and Emirati forces took her back to Dubai, according to two people who helped her escape.
It was her second failed attempt to flee abroad after trying to leave the UAE in 2002 as a teenager.
In a video clip obtained by BBC Panorama and provided to CNN before ‘The Missing Princess’ documentary airing on Tuesday night, Princess Latifa said:’ I am a hostage. This villa has been converted into a prison. All windows are closed. , I can not open any window … I was alone, alone locked up. No access to medical help, no trial, no charge, nothing. ”
CNN did not independently confirm the videos or Latifa’s current location. CNN contacted the Dubai government for comment.
Princess Latifa secretly recorded the videos herself on a cellphone while hiding in a closed bathroom, according to the BBC. The documentary says about a year after Latifa was taken back to Dubai, her friend Tiina Jauhiainen was contacted by someone who helped her secretly rejoin her.
Jauhiainen managed to get a phone call to Latifa and since then the princess has recorded many video messages “describing her imprisonment in a villa converted into a prison with its windows locked out,” according to a BBC press release.
“BBC Panorama has independently verified the details of the place where Latifa was held hostage. She has been guarded by about thirty police and is working on rotation, inside and outside the villa. The location is only a few meters from the beach. It is not known or she is still there, ”reads the press release.
In another video shown in the documentary, Latifa says: “I have been here since then, more than a year in solitary confinement. No access to medical assistance, no trial, no charge, nothing … Every day is “I’m worried about my safety and the police are threatening me that I will never see the sun again. I’m not safe here.”
Jauhiainen tells the documentary that she is very worried about her friend: “She is so pale that she has not seen sunlight for months. She can basically just move from her room to the kitchen and back.”
Robinson paid the visit at the request of the ruling family, according to a communication sent by the UAE mission in Geneva to the Office of Special Procedures at the High Commissioner for Human Rights for the United Nations. “The documents respond to and refute false allegations about Her Highness, proving that she lives and works with her family in Dubai,” the statement said.
In the BBC Panorama episode, however, Robinson gives a different version of her controversial encounter with Latifa in 2018.
“I was deceived, initially by my good friend Princess Haya, because she was deceived. Haya started explaining that Latifa had a serious bipolar problem. And they told me in a very convincing way: ‘we do not’. I do not want Latifa to undergo any further trauma ‘… I did not know how to address someone who was bipolar about their trauma. And I did not really want to talk to her and increase the trauma during a nice lunch not, ‘Robinson says in a clip from the program.
Princess Haya fled with her two children from Dubai to London with the sheikh in 2019. The princess, who was the sheikh’s sixth wife and was not the mother of Latifa, later brought a case to the High Court in London for custody for seeking her two children nine and 13 years old, for fear that they too would be abducted.
Last year, a judge at the family section of the High Court in London ruled that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum was waging a “campaign of fear and intimidation” against Princess Haya.
The court ruled that the sheikh had on three occasions arranged kidnappings of two of his daughters, including one from the historic British city of Cambridge and Princess Latifa in international waters off the coast of India.
Andrew McFarlane, the oldest family judge in the UK, found that Sheika Shamsa, one of the sheikh’s daughters by another woman, had run away from her family in the summer of 2000 during her visit to the UK. She was later abducted in Cambridge and forced into a car by men who worked for her father before being driven to the sheik’s property. There she was put on a helicopter to Deauville in France and then flown back to Dubai.
The other daughter, Latifa, twice tried to escape her Emirati family but was forced back, once in 2002 from the Dubai border with Oman, and in 2018 “by an armed commando attack at sea” in international waters off the coast of India. , the judge found.
“With regard to Shamsa and Latifa, it is alleged that they were deprived of their liberty after their return to the father’s family,” the verdict said, finding that the allegation was true.
CNN reported at the time that Sheikh Mohammed – the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates – said the court’s assessment was a one-sided report.
“This case is about extremely personal and private matters concerning our children. The appeal has been made to protect the best interests and welfare of the children. The result does not protect my children from media attention like other children in the family’s proceedings in the The UK is protected, ”he said in a statement issued by his representatives.
“As head of government, I could not take part in the court’s fact-finding process. This led to the release of a ‘fact-finding’ that inevitably tells only one side of the story. I ask that the media respect our privacy. children and do not enter their lives in the United Kingdom. ‘