The daughter of the Dubai ruler, who wanted to flee the emirate in 2018 but was forcibly returned, used a smuggled phone to send a series of secret video messages taken over the past two years, claiming she was in ‘ a hostage is being held. locked villa surrounded by police.
The messages have meanwhile been stopped, and campaigners for Princess Latifa al-Maktoum are calling for international intervention in her case.
The new videos were obtained by BBC Panorama and will be broadcast in more detail in the UK on Tuesday night. This is the first time the princess has appeared, except in material released by the Dubai royal family, since a YouTube video appeared after her escape attempt three years ago.
“If you watch this video, it’s not a good thing, whether I’m dead, or that I’m in a very, very, very bad situation,” she said in the footage, which raised international concerns about her. fate provoked.
The UAE government had earlier said Latifa, 35, was safe and happy with her family.
The new videos contain her first version of how her attempt to flee in January 2018, which was years in the making, failed. In an operation planned with a French businessman, Hervé Jaubert, and her martial arts instructor and friend Tiina Jauhiainen, Latifa took a rubber boat from the shores of Dubai to an American yacht in international waters.
Eight days later, on the west coast of India, the yacht was stormed by special forces, who, according to Jauhiainen, used smoke grenades to force her and Latifa to the deck and stay under gunfire.
A British judge last year accepted the evidence that the raid was carried out by Indian soldiers and that Latifa and others may have given up their position by communicating with people while at sea. ‘Latifa’s last words when she pulled away and screamed and screamed was’ you can not get me back alive. Do not take me back. Shoot me here, do not take me back ‘, “reads the verdict.
In the new footage, which was taken more than a year after Latifa was returned, she tells of the struggle with the soldiers on the boat, ‘kicked and fought’ and bit a commando’s arm, the BBC said. She says she was calmed down and spent when she was carried to a jet and woke up in Dubai.
Jauhiainen and Jaubert were detained in the UAE for two weeks and subsequently released.
Latifa’s father is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai and the vice-president of the UAE. She is the second of his 25 children who try to escape from the family, are caught again and then disappear.
Her older sister Shamsa was seized from the streets of Cambridge after fleeing Surrey Estate in 2000. In an email she smuggled out of Dubai into exile, Shamsa claims: ‘I was caught by my father, he managed to track me down by someone I contacted … He sent four Arab men to catch me, they carried guns and threatened me. ‘
Latifa said in the video taken before her escape bid that she had tried to escape at the age of 16 before, but was caught at the border, sent to prison for more than three years and beaten and tortured. “It was constant torture, constant torture, even if they did not physically hit me, they tortured me,” Latifa said. “They will make noises to harass me, and then they will come in the middle of the night, pull me out of bed and hit me.”
A British family court ruled last year that Sheikh Mohammed, 71, had orchestrated and ‘deprived’ the kidnappers of the two women. [them] of their freedom ”. The verdict was part of an action in which his sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya (46), fled to London with their two young children in April 2019, and according to the court a campaign of ‘intimidation’ by the sheikh.
The verdict accepts virtually all of Haya’s allegations as true because of the likelihood, including that the sheikh tried to have her abducted by helicopter, arranged for guns to be left in her bedroom and threatening poems about her were published online.
Mary Robinson, a former Irish president and high commissioner of the UN for human rights, was flown to Dubai to meet Latifa after being returned there in 2018. The UAE Foreign Ministry later released photos of the visit, claiming that Latifa “receives the necessary” care and support she needs “and” refutes[ted] false allegations ”. Robinson also later said Latifa was “in the loving care of her family”.
But Robinson told the BBC she was “terribly deceived” during the visit and never asked Latifa about her situation, fearing it would exacerbate a mental condition which she said was the princess. The images are meant to be private and serve as a ‘proof of life’, she added. ‘I was especially deceived when the photos became known. It was a total surprise … I was absolutely stunned. ‘