The daughter of the Dubai ruler, who tried to flee the emirate in 2018 but was forcibly returned, used a smuggled phone to send a series of secret video messages taken in the past two years claiming she was being held “hostage” in a locked villa surrounded by the police.
The messages have since ceased, and Princess Latifa al-Maktoum’s activists are calling for international intervention in her case.
The new videos were obtained by BBC Panorama and will be shown in more detail on Tuesday evening in the UK. It 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 are watching this video, it is not such a good thing, or I am either dead or in a very, very, very bad situation,” she said in that footage, which sparked international concern for her fate.
The UAE government said earlier that Latifa, 35, is safe and happy with her family.
The new videos include his first account of how his years-long attempt to escape in January 2018 failed. In a planned operation with a French businessman, Hervé Jaubert, and his martial arts instructor and friend Tiina Jauhiainen, Latifa took a boat off the coast of Dubai for a US flag yacht in international waters.
Eight days later, on the west coast of India, the yacht was invaded by special forces who, says Jauhiainen, used smoke grenades to force her and Latifa to go on deck and detained them at gunpoint.
A UK judge last year accepted testimony that the operation was conducted by Indian soldiers and that Latifa and others may have denounced their position when communicating with people while at sea. “Latifa’s last words as she was dragged kicking and screaming were in the sense that ‘You cannot bring me back alive. Don’t take me back. Shoot me here, don’t take me back, ”said the trial.
In the new footage, recorded more than a year after Latifa was returned, she says she fought with soldiers on the boat, “kicking and fighting” and biting the arm of a command, the BBC said. She says she was reassured and passed out when being loaded onto a jet, waking up in Dubai.
Jauhiainen and Jaubert were detained in the United Arab Emirates for two weeks and then released.
Latifa’s father is Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, ruler of Dubai and vice president of the United Arab Emirates. She is the second of her 25 children to try to escape from the family, be recaptured and then disappear.
Her older sister, Shamsa, was apprehended on the streets of Cambridge after fleeing the family’s property in Surrey in 2000. In an email she smuggled out of captivity in Dubai, Shamsa claimed: “I was caught by my father, he managed to locate me through someone I kept in touch with … He sent four Arab men to pick me up, they were armed and threatening me. “
Latifa said in the video recorded before her escape attempt that she had tried to escape once before, at 16, but was captured at the border, imprisoned for more than three years, and beaten and tortured. “It was constant torture, constant torture, even when they weren’t physically hitting me, they were torturing me,” said Latifa. “They made sounds to harass me and then came in the middle of the night to pull me out of bed, to hit me.”
A UK family court ruled last year that Sheikh Mohammed, 71, orchestrated the abductions of the two women and “deprived [them] of your freedom ”. The trial was part of a lawsuit involving his sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya, 46, who fled to London in April 2019 with her two young children and which the court said was subjected to an “intimidation” campaign by of the sheik.
The trial accepted virtually all of Haya’s claims as true to the balance of the odds, including that the sheikh tried to hijack her by helicopter, arranged for weapons to be left in her room and published threatening poems about her online.
Mary Robinson, a former Irish president and UN high commissioner for human rights, flew to Dubai to meet Latifa after she returned there in 2018. The UAE Foreign Ministry subsequently released photos of the visit, claiming that they showed that Latifa was “receiving the necessary care and support it requires” and “refuting[ted] false allegations ”. Robinson also later said that Latifa was “in the loving care of his family”.
But Robinson told the BBC that she had been “terribly deceived” during the visit and never asked Latifa about her situation, fearing it would aggravate a mental condition she was told the princess had. The images were intended to be private and serve as “proof of life,” he added. “I was particularly mistaken when the photos became public. It was a total surprise … I was absolutely amazed. “