CAIRO – Since 2018, when Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed al-Maktoum, one of the daughters of the Dubai ruler, disappeared after trying to escape her privileged but suffocating life in a royal palace, her friends insist that she was dragged back home. against it goes and was being kept incommunicado.
On Tuesday, they produced video evidence.
Contradicting her family’s insistence that she has been enjoying her time with them at home for the past two years, Sheikha Latifa says in a series of videos released by her supporters that she is “a hostage” and fears for her life.
“Every day, I am concerned about my safety in my life. I really don’t know if I will survive this situation, ”said Sheikha Latifa in a self-recorded video, according to a transcript provided by an advocate working on his case, David Haigh.
“The police threaten me that they would take me outside and shoot me if I didn’t cooperate with them,” she said. “They also threatened me that I would be in prison for life and never see the sun again.”
The sheikha’s case has sparked outrage outside the United Arab Emirates since 2018, after reports surfaced in the international media that she had tried to escape Dubai on a yacht piloted by a Frenchman who claimed to be a former spy, just for a team of commandos from India and the Emirates. to seize the ship, detain everyone on board and take it back to Dubai.
In a video recorded before her flight, she said she wanted to leave because of the restrictions her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, had imposed on her: Forbidden to travel outside Dubai, she was followed by guards in everywhere she entered the city-state that her father ruled.
After the 2018 episode, Sheikha Latif was practically invisible in public again.
For much of that time, however, she secretly recorded videos from inside the villa where she was detained, said Haigh, usually locking herself in a bathroom, the only place where she had privacy. After communicating with friends for the first time by letters, she switched to a phone that friends had smuggled into her, sending regular updates between early 2019 and late 2020, Haigh said.
In them, according to the transcripts, she said she was being held in a villa that had actually been turned into a prison, with the windows locked. Five policemen were on guard outside, she said, and two policemen inside.
Her flight attempt in 2018 was halted, Sheikha Latifa said, when commandos invaded the yacht, threw it on deck, tied her up while she tried to fight them and injected her with tranquilizers. After she was taken back to Dubai by helicopter and private jet, she said, she was interrogated for two weeks and held in solitary confinement in a prison near the airport.
Some of the new videos were first published by the BBC on Tuesday. Although they could not be independently verified, Haigh said in an interview that he had prepared them for release. His family was not immediately available for comment.
Before Tuesday, Sheikha Latifa’s only recent glimpse was in December 2018, after she was brought back to Dubai. Her family released pictures of her sitting uncomfortably with Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and former United Nations human rights commissioner.
Mrs. Robinson said at the time that she believed that the sheikha was mentally disturbed and was recovering from the care of her family. But now she told the BBC that she felt she had been “cheated” when pictures of what she assumed was a private lunch were published.
Sheikha Latifa said in one of the videos that she was persuaded to come to lunch by Princess Haya, one of her father’s wives, but she did not know who Mrs. Robinson was, what the lunch was for or why her stepmother insisted on taking a photo of her with Mrs. Robinson. She just agreed “to be polite,” she said.
As for Ms. Robinson’s comments at the time, Sheikha Latifa said in a video that “statements about me being with my family or receiving treatment or in recovery are lies”.
Her family repeatedly insisted that she do what she called “advertising,” she said.
“They wanted me to make a video and say that I am here happily and voluntarily. And I refused, ”she said in a video, according to a transcript.
Princess Haya also came to support her stepdaughter’s version of events. In court documents filed in Britain last year, after the princess left Dubai with her young children and asked for the sheikh’s divorce, she said both Sheikh Latifa and one of the sheikh’s sisters were severely punished for trying to escape in the past. .
In late 2020, videos from Sheikha Latifa stopped coming, Haigh said, prompting him and Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish capoeira instructor who accompanied the sheikha on the yacht, to release them.
They were also scheduled to land while the United Nations Working Group on Forced or Involuntary Disappearances held a session on the sheikh case.