Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum – daughter of Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – was last seen publicly in March 2018 on board a yacht off the coast of India before an attack by Indian forces and from the Emirates to take them back to Dubai, according to two people who helped plan their escape.
It was his second failed attempt to flee abroad after he tried to leave the United Arab Emirates in 2002 as a teenager.
In a video clip, obtained by BBC Panorama and provided to CNN before the documentary ‘The Missing Princess’ that airs on Tuesday night, Princess Latifa says: “I am a hostage. This villa has been converted into a prison. All windows they are closed with bars, I cannot open any windows … I was alone, in solitary confinement. Without access to medical help, without trial, without charge, nothing. ”
CNN has not independently verified Latifa’s videos or current location. CNN contacted the Dubai government for comment.
Princess Latifa secretly recorded the videos on a cell phone while hiding in a locked bathroom, according to the BBC. The documentary says that about a year after Latifa was taken back to Dubai, her friend Tiina Jauhiainen was contacted by someone who helped her to secretly reconnect with her.
Jauhiainen got a phone for Latifa, and since then the princess has recorded many video messages “describing her captivity in a village converted into a prison with the windows closed with bars”, according to a BBC press release.
“The BBC Panorama independently verified the details of where Latifa was being held hostage. She was watched by around 30 police officers, working in rotation, inside and outside the villa. The place is just meters from the beach. It is unknown if she is still there, “says the statement.
In another video to be shown in the documentary Latifa, he says: “I have been here since then, for more than a year in solitary confinement. Without access to medical care, without trial, without charge, nothing … Every day I am worried about my safety and the police threaten me that I will never see the sun again. I am not safe here. ”
Jauhiainen says in the documentary that she is very concerned about her friend: “She has been so pale for months that she hasn’t seen the sunlight. She can basically go from the bedroom to the kitchen and come back.”
Robinson paid the visit at the request of the ruling family, according to a statement that the United Arab Emirates mission in Geneva sent to the Office of Special Procedures of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “The documents respond to and refute false claims that have been made about His Highness, providing evidence that she is alive and living with her family in Dubai,” the statement said.
However, in the BBC Panorama episode, Robinson gives a different account of his controversial meeting with Latifa in 2018.
“I was deceived, initially by my good friend Princess Haya, because she was deceived. Haya began to explain that Latifa had a very serious bipolar problem. And they were telling me, in a very convincing way: ‘we don’t’ I don’t want Latifa to go through any more trauma ‘… I didn’t know how to address someone who was bipolar about his trauma. And I really didn’t want to talk to her and add to the trauma over a good lunch, “Robinson says in a clip from the show.
Princess Haya fled Dubai to London with her two sons of the sheikh in 2019. The princess, who was the sheikh’s sixth wife and not Latifa’s mother, later opened a case in London’s high court to request custody of their own two children, aged nine and 13, fearing that they too would be kidnapped.
Last year, a family division judge at the London Supreme Court concluded that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum led a “campaign of fear and intimidation” against Princess Haya.
The court ruled that the sheikh organized the abductions of two of his daughters on three occasions – including one from the historic city of Cambridge, UK, and Princess Latifa in international waters off the coast of India.
Andrew McFarlane, the UK’s most experienced family judge, established it as a fact that Sheika Shamsa, one of the sheikh’s daughters with another wife, ran away from her family in the summer of 2000 while visiting the UK. She was later kidnapped and forced into a car in Cambridge by men who worked for her father, before being taken to the sheikh’s property. There, she was put on a helicopter to Deauville, France, and then on a jet back to Dubai.
The other daughter, Latifa, had twice tried to escape her family from the Emirates, but was forced to return, once in 2002 from the Dubai border with Oman and in 2018 “by an armed command attack at sea” in international waters near the coast of India, the judge found.
“With respect to Shamsa and Latifa, it is said that after their return to custody of the father’s family, they were deprived of their freedom,” said the sentence, concluding the statement as true.
CNN reported at the time that Sheikh Mohammed – the UAE’s vice president and prime minister – said the court’s assessment was unilateral.
“This case concerns highly personal and private issues related to our children. The appeal was made to protect the best interests and well-being of children. The result does not protect my children from media attention in the same way as other children in Family lawsuits in The UK are protected, “he said in a statement released by his representatives.
“As head of the government, I was unable to participate in the court’s fact-finding process. This resulted in the release of a ‘fact-finding’ sentence that inevitably tells only one side of the story. I ask the media to respect our children’s privacy and not to meddle in their lives in the UK. ”