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 * The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai
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A Reporter at Large
May 8, 2023 Issue


THE FUGITIVE PRINCESSES OF DUBAI

As the emirate’s ruler espoused gender equality, four royal women staked their
lives on escaping his control.

By Heidi Blake

May 1, 2023
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Before fleeing Dubai by sea, Sheikha Latifa called her father a “major
criminal,” responsible for torturing and imprisoning women who had disobeyed
him.Photo illustration by Joan Wong; Source photographs from Alamy; Getty
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Far out on the Arabian Sea one night in February, 2018, Sheikha Latifa bint
Mohammed Al Maktoum, the fugitive daughter of Dubai’s ruling emir, marvelled at
the stars. The voyage had been rough. Since setting out by dinghy and Jet Ski a
few days before, she had been swamped by powerful waves, soaking the belongings
she’d stowed in her backpack; after clambering aboard the yacht she’d secured
for her escape, she’d spent days racked with nausea as it pitched on the swell.
But tonight the sea was calmer, and she felt the stirring of an unfamiliar
sensation. She was free.

Latifa was thirty-two and petite, with a loose ponytail and intense dark eyes.
Beside her was her friend Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish martial-arts instructor
who had helped prepare for her escape. The night was cool, and the women were
huddled in hoodies, but Latifa urged her friend to sleep on deck with her.
Jauhiainen was tired, and promised they could do it another time: from now on,
there would be plenty of chances to see the stars.



For more than half her life, Latifa had been devising plans to flee her father,
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the leader of Dubai and the Prime
Minister of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Mohammed is an ally of Western
governments, celebrated for transforming Dubai into a modern power. Publicly, he
has placed gender equality at the heart of his plan to propel the U.A.E. to the
top of the world economic order, vowing to “remove all the hurdles that women
face.” But for his daughter Dubai was “an open air prison,” where disobedience
was brutally punished.

In her teens, Latifa had been ferociously beaten for defying her father. As an
adult, she was forbidden to leave Dubai and kept under the constant surveillance
of guards. Escape presented a challenge of “unfathomable immensity,” Latifa
knew. “It will be the best or last thing I do,” she wrote. “I have never known
true freedom. For me, it’s something worth dying for.” (I have drawn details of
Latifa’s experience from hundreds of letters, e-mails, texts, and audio messages
that she sent to friends in the course of a decade.)

Latifa had kept her plan secret for years as she laid the groundwork: training
in extreme sports, obtaining a fake passport, and smuggling cash to a network of
conspirators. By the time she revealed the scheme to Jauhiainen, she had already
hired a yachtsman to collect her off the coast and convey her to India or Sri
Lanka, from where she hoped to fly to the United States and claim asylum. She
just needed help getting to the rendezvous point, sixteen miles offshore, in
international waters.

Jauhiainen is a sturdy, forthright woman, with high cheekbones and ice-blue
eyes. She had grown close to Latifa while giving her capoeira lessons on the
palace grounds, and wanted to help her see the world. “I was so excited,” she
told me. “Finally, we will be able to do this together.” She’d promised to
accompany Latifa all the way to freedom.



Before they set off, Latifa sneaked over to Jauhiainen’s apartment, which had
become a storehouse for the scuba equipment, satellite communicators, and boat
parts the two women had amassed, and sat down in front of a video recorder.
Dressed in a loose blue T-shirt, she recorded almost forty minutes of testimony,
to be released in the event of her capture. Her father, she said, was a “major
criminal,” responsible for torturing and imprisoning numerous women who
disobeyed him. Her older sister had languished in captivity under sedation
following her own attempt to get out, eighteen years earlier, she said, and her
aunt had been killed for disobedience. Latifa was running away to claim a life
“where I don’t have to be silenced,” where she could wake up in the morning and
think, “I can do whatever I want today, I can go wherever I want, I have all the
choices in the world.” (Attorneys for Sheikh Mohammed denied any wrongdoing on
his part, but declined to respond to detailed questions.)

Aboard the yacht, Latifa texted a friend, “I really feel so free now. Walking
target yes but totally free.” A week into the voyage, though, the captain
spotted another ship apparently tailing them, and a small plane circling
overhead. The runaways were about thirty miles off the coast of India, and the
yacht was running low on fuel. The captain feared that Latifa had been located.
“They will kill her,” he texted a friend on March 3rd.

The next day, another plane flew over. By nightfall, all was calm, but Latifa
had become unreachably silent, Jauhiainen said. At around 10 p.m., the two women
descended to their cabin, and Latifa brushed her teeth in the cramped bathroom.
As she emerged, the air exploded with a series of blasts. Boots pounded on the
deck overhead. “They’ve found me,” Latifa said. The friends shut themselves in
the bathroom and sent a string of S.O.S. messages. Soon, smoke was pouring in
through the air vents and light fixtures. As they struggled for breath, Latifa
said that she was sorry, and Jauhiainen hugged her. Then they stumbled from the
room.

The darkness was sliced in all directions by the laser sights of assault rifles.
Masked men seized the women and forced them up to the deck, where the captain
and his crew lay bound and beaten. The floor was pooled with blood. Latifa’s
hands were tied behind her back and she was thrown down, but she resisted:
kicking, screaming, and clinging to the gunwales. As the men dragged her away,
Jauhiainen heard her cry out, “Shoot me here! Don’t take me back.” Then the
princess vanished overboard.

The Zabeel Palace, Sheikh Mohammed’s royal seat, is a white-columned citadel set
in palm-fringed grounds with elaborate fountains and roaming peacocks. When it
was built, in the mid-sixties, it stood on bare sand, alone in the desert. Now
it divides the futuristic whirl of downtown Dubai from the souks of the old
town—balanced, as its occupants are, between modernity and the past. When Sheikh
Mohammed receives guests, he likes to remind them how the skyline sprang from
the sand. “All this was nothing in 2000,” he told a film crew in 2007, gesturing
at the city with a conjurer’s sweep of the arm. “But look now.”

Video From The New Yorker

Auntie: The Perils of a Group Text with Twentysomethings



When Sheikh Mohammed was born, in 1949, his birthright was a tiny coastal port,
one of seven desert sheikhdoms under the control of the British Empire. His
family ruled from a clay-and-coral compound where they slept on the roof in
summer, sprinkling themselves with water to stay cool. Sheikh Mohammed’s memoir,
“My Story,” emphasizes a childhood steeped in Bedouin tradition. By the age of
eight, he was hunting in the desert with dogs and falcons. An early photograph
shows a tiny, jug-eared boy, stroking a huge hunting bird perched on his wrist.
The memoir describes his mother as a figure of mythic virtue—“with a queenly
bearing that enchanted all around her”—but also as a strong woman, who could
shoot “better than many men” and rode horses “as if she had been born to be in
the saddle.” Her name was Latifa.

At around the age of ten, Mohammed accompanied his father, Sheikh Rashid, on a
trip to London. Landing at Heathrow, he gazed at the teeming airport—a “symbol
of the powerful economy that drove it”—and felt a presentiment: “We, in Dubai,
had the potential to become a global city.” Later, at Downing Street, he watched
his father argue that Dubai should build an international airport of its own.

“Your landlord sent me. I’m the cheap guy who won’t solve the problem.”
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The British announced their withdrawal from the Gulf in 1968, and the newly
formed U.A.E. became a major exporter of oil. Sheikh Mohammed returned from
military training in England to take a leading role in his father’s government.
Half a century later, he is hailed as a modernizing genius who transformed Dubai
into a thriving center of commerce, with an airport that long ago replaced
Heathrow as the busiest international hub in the world.



When Sheikh Rashid died, in 1990, custom dictated that his eldest son, the
mild-mannered Sheikh Maktoum, take over as ruler, but no one doubted who was
really running the country. It was Sheikh Mohammed who devised the open-skies
initiative that welcomed global travellers and who launched the Emirates
airline. He introduced a customs-free policy that turned Dubai into one of the
world’s busiest shipping centers, and a network of zero-tax zones that lured
international banks and businesses; he made Dubai the first place in the Gulf
where foreigners could own property. In the resulting real-estate boom, he
flaunted Dubai’s riches with a series of imposing landmarks, including the Burj
Al Arab, frequently billed as the world’s most luxurious hotel, and the Burj
Khalifa, the world’s tallest building. Grander still were several archipelagoes
of artificial islands, including two in the shape of palm trees and another
representing a map of the world, all so vast that they can be seen from space.



Sheikh Mohammed officially took the throne after his brother’s death, in 2006.
At home, he cultivated the image of a traditional Arab leader, styling himself
as a devoted family man, a prolific author of Nabati poetry, and a champion
endurance horseman. Abroad, he assiduously courted the West.

After the September 11th attacks, the U.A.E. became a crucial strategic partner
in the war on terror. Dubai cracked down on terror financing through its banks
and became America’s largest naval port of call outside the U.S. Meanwhile, the
Emirati government invested tens of billions of dollars in America and Britain,
and Sheikh Mohammed amassed a vast global property portfolio. He is one of
Britain’s biggest private landholders, with a collection of homes that includes
Dalham Hall, a grand neoclassical residence set in thirty-three hundred acres of
Suffolk parkland, and a seventy-five-million-pound manor in Surrey. He also owns
the world’s largest Thoroughbred-racing operation, through his stable Godolphin,
in Newmarket—the basis of a valuable friendship with Queen Elizabeth, who loved
horse racing.

As his stature grew, Sheikh Mohammed sought to counter the perception of the
U.A.E. as a repressive autocracy. His government passed a law guaranteeing women
equal pay for equal work and elevated nine female leaders to cabinet positions.
In a message to mark Emirati Women’s Day last year, he called women “the soul
and spirit of the country.”

Many experts dismiss these changes as insufficient. “There are women in very
prominent positions now, but in reality a lot of that is window dressing,” Neil
Quilliam, a fellow in Middle East affairs at the Chatham House think tank, told
me. “Women are expected to behave within very tight boundaries, and if they go
outside them they are dishonoring the family.” Emirati women continue to live
under male guardianship, unable to work or marry without permission. Men can
marry multiple women and unilaterally divorce their wives, but women require a
court order to dissolve a marriage. Men who murder women can still be pardoned
by the victim’s relatives, which allows honor killings to go unpunished, since
in such cases victim and perpetrator are often related.

Within Dubai’s ruling family, women inhabit a wrenching dual role: they are
exalted as emblems of female advancement while privately obligated to “carry the
honor” for the dynasty. Sheikh Mohammed has married at least six women, who have
borne him dozens of children. According to Hussein Ibish, a senior resident
scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, female disobedience in
the Emir’s circle provokes a “politically dangerous” question among subjects:
How can you really tell us what to do when you can’t control your own family?
The logic of absolute power requires that such rebellions be crushed swiftly and
publicly. “That’s performative patriarchy,” Ibish said. “You want to watch me
control my family? Here you go.”

Latifa passed the first decade of her life without knowing that she had sisters.
Her mother, Houria Lamara, was an Algerian beauty who married Sheikh Mohammed
and bore him four children. But Latifa did not grow up with her birth family.
She and her younger brother were taken away as babies and presented as gifts to
their father’s childless sister.

Life in her aunt’s palace was “horribly suffocating,” Latifa recalled. She was
kept with dozens of other children and minded by governesses, who made them
memorize the Quran and hardly ever let them out of their rooms. Her aunt rarely
visited, and when she did she was cruel. On one occasion, Latifa recalled, she
burst into the nursery and beat the children until their bodies were covered
with welts. (The government of Dubai declined to comment on this incident.)

“I remember as a kid always being at the window watching people outside,” Latifa
wrote. From time to time, photographers showed up and costumed her “like a doll,
in jewels, dresses and makeup,” she recalled. They gave her puppies to play
with, and took photos that she later learned were sent to her mother. But when
the shoot was over the props were taken away and she was sent back to her room.
At night, she dreamed of flying a kite so huge it carried her into the sky.

Once a year, Latifa was taken to visit Houria and her other daughters, Shamsa
and Maitha, whom she was told were her aunt and cousins. Shamsa, four years
older, made a particular impression. She was “full of life and adventure,”
Latifa wrote, a “real thrill seeker but also a compassionate person.” When
Latifa was about ten, she learned the truth. Shamsa marched into her aunt’s
palace and demanded that her younger sister and brother be sent home. “Shamsa
was the only one who fought for us and wanted us,” Latifa wrote. “I saw her as a
mother figure and best friend.”



The siblings were returned to their mother, and Sheikh Mohammed visited from
time to time. A staff member described him as a “doting father,” plying his
daughters with hugs and kisses. But the Sheikh was also enraged by challenges to
his authority. Latifa told friends that she once saw him punch Shamsa repeatedly
in the head for interrupting him. (Sheikh Mohammed’s attorneys deny that he was
violent with his daughters.)

As Shamsa matured, she began to chafe against the constraints of royal
womanhood. She wanted to drive and travel and study, and hated covering herself
with the traditional abaya. “Shamsa was rebellious and so was I,” Latifa wrote.
“But Shamsa had a shorter fuse.” Shamsa and her father clashed over his refusal
to allow her to go to college. “He didn’t even ask me what I was interested in,”
Shamsa wrote to a cousin. She had considered suicide, but now she recovered her
resolve. “I want to depend on myself, completely,” she wrote. “The only thing
that scares me is imagining myself old and regretting not trying when I was 18.”



In early 2000, soon after sending the letter, Shamsa appeared at Latifa’s
bedroom door and told her that she was leaving. “Will you come with me?” she
asked.

Latifa was stricken. She was fourteen, and Shamsa was her mainstay. A silence
hung between them.

“Never mind,” Shamsa said. She turned and walked away.

“That moment was etched into my memory,” Latifa wrote. “Because had I said yes
maybe the outcome would have been different.”

The Longcross Estate is a vast manor set in the Surrey countryside. When Sheikh
Mohammed bought the property, he took possession of a swath of landscape that
had captivated him as a child. In “My Story,” he recalled driving in England
with his father. “Nothing could have prepared me for the beauty of this land,”
he wrote. “There were green hills that rolled away like waves on the sea.”

During the summer, when Dubai grew oppressively hot, Sheikh Mohammed would bring
a few favored wives and children to England. In 2000, despite Shamsa’s
rebelliousness, she was allowed to join the party at Longcross. She loved
England—it was her favorite place, she had told Latifa. She also had a soft spot
for one of her father’s British guards: a former policeman and Army officer in
his early forties named Grant Osborne. Shamsa tried to get close to Osborne,
according to a friend she spoke to frequently that summer, but he rebuffed her.

Security at Longcross was tight: the estate was monitored by CCTV cameras and
patrolled by guards. But on a night in June, when the house was still, Shamsa
crept out through the darkness and climbed into a black Range Rover that had
been left unattended. Though she had not been allowed to drive, she managed to
start the engine and veer off across the grounds. When she reached the outer
wall, she ditched the car and slipped through a gate on foot.



After the abandoned car was discovered, the next morning, Sheikh Mohammed
helicoptered in from his equestrian base in Newmarket to lead the hunt. Staff
fanned out in cars and on horseback, but all they found was Shamsa’s cell phone,
dropped outside the gate. No one at Longcross could offer any clue to her
whereabouts—but back in Dubai Latifa heard from her sister. She had secured a
new phone, and was staying at a hostel in southeast London, considering her next
move.

On June 21st, Shamsa walked into an unassuming office on a backstreet in
London’s West End. She was greeted by a man with pale-blue eyes and a soft chin:
a lawyer named Paul Simon, whom she had found through the Yellow Pages. She told
him that she had fled the royal family of Dubai and wanted to claim asylum.
Simon was out of his depth—his firm normally dealt with routine immigration
cases, processing work visas and citizenship applications—but he knew enough to
advise Shamsa that her claim would almost certainly fail, “in light of the
friendly relations” between the U.K. and the U.A.E.

Shamsa met Simon twice more in the following weeks. She was now staying with an
Australian friend in Elephant and Castle, a South London neighborhood of
tenement blocks and litter-strewn streets. She told him she feared her father
would find her and force her to return to Dubai—but Simon said it would be
difficult to help her unless she produced her passport, which was in her
family’s control.

Shamsa was running out of options. She told Latifa that their father had visited
a friend of hers in the Emirates, offering a Rolex in exchange for help tracking
her down. Shamsa believed that her friend’s phone had been bugged, but she kept
calling anyway. Latifa was appalled, but she reasoned, “She had nobody else to
talk to.”

Late that summer, Shamsa reached out to Osborne, the security officer, and
begged for his help. This time, he responded warmly, arranging to take her to
Cambridge, where he booked a room for two nights at the University Arms, the
city’s oldest and grandest hotel. (Osborne said that this account contained
“incorrect and false information” but refused to point to specifics.)

On August 19th, Shamsa and Osborne were captured on CCTV exiting the hotel and
climbing into a car. She was drunk, and Osborne took the wheel. He drove Shamsa
to a nearby bridge, where he pulled over abruptly and got out. It was an ambush.
Four Emirati men leaped into the vehicle, and it sped away. Shamsa was driven to
her father’s Newmarket estate, where she spent a desolate night in the manor
house, Dalham Hall. At first light, she was hustled out of the country, bound
for Dubai.

On the first of September, a Surrey woman named Jane-Marie Allen came home from
vacation to find a strange message on her answering machine, left by someone who
gave a name sounding like “Shansa.” The caller said she had been “returned to
Dubai against her will” and asked that her attorney, Paul Simon, be alerted.
Allen didn’t know the woman—a wrong number, presumably—but she was clearly in
trouble. Allen called the police.

“He once fell into the garbage disposal and doesn’t like to talk about it.”
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Officers in Surrey talked to Simon and learned about his meetings with Shamsa.
When they heard she was a member of Dubai’s royal family, they referred the
matter to the local Special Branch, a police unit that handled national
security. Officers contacted representatives of the family, who, according to
the police log, insisted that they “had no knowledge of the name given or any
such incident.” Whether or not the officers believed this falsehood, they
reasoned—in consultation with Simon—that Shamsa had access to a phone, and could
call the police herself if she needed to. The matter was closed without any
crime being recorded. (Simon declined to comment for this article, citing client
confidentiality.)

Six months after the abduction, Simon got an e-mail containing a message from
Shamsa. “I’m being watched all the time so I’ll get straight to the point. I was
caught,” she wrote. “Paul, I know these people, they have all the money, they
have all the power, they think they can do anything.” Shamsa was being held on
the palace grounds in Dubai, where she said her father’s guards were “trying to
terrorise me and break me.” But she had found a way to get messages out, by
persuading an attendant to smuggle notes in her hair and deliver them to Latifa
and other supporters. In one, Shamsa instructed Simon to involve the British
authorities “immediately.”



Simon went back to the police and conveyed Shamsa’s message: she had been
removed from the country against her will, in contravention of the U.K.’s laws
against kidnapping. (Sheikh Mohammed’s attorneys deny this.) When officers took
Simon’s statement, he told them everything he knew—but said that his “lack of
competence and expertise” outside the field of immigration law meant he could no
longer act on Shamsa’s behalf. His report worked its way sluggishly through the
system. It trickled from the Surrey police back through the secretive echelons
of Special Branch, before it reached the desk of a senior detective in
Cambridgeshire—whose office happened to face the University Arms Hotel, the last
place Shamsa was seen.

One morning in February, 2001, Detective Chief Inspector David Beck was settling
down with a cup of coffee and the monthly crime statistics when an officer from
Special Branch handed him a file. He read it with growing astonishment. A junior
officer, dispatched to the hotel, brought him back a copy of the CCTV footage
showing Shamsa and Osborne leaving together.

Beck had two daughters about Shamsa’s age, and he told me that he knew the late
teens could be a “difficult time” for families. Staring at the
surveillance-camera imagery, he wondered, “Are you just trying to make trouble
for your father? Or are you serious about this?”

Beck contacted Simon, who told him that Shamsa now had a phone; Latifa, who had
occasionally been able to send her sister clothes and other items, had smuggled
it in. When he dialled the number, he noted in a police memo, Shamsa recounted
Osborne’s involvement in her capture and gave the names of three of the men who
she said had ambushed her on the bridge. Among them was the head of the Dubai
Air Wing, which provided helicopters and pilots for the Sheikh. According to
Shamsa, the men drove her to Dalham Hall, and she was forcibly sedated. The next
day, they flew her by helicopter to France, where they were met by another
longtime employee of her father’s—a British man named David Walsh—and taken by
private jet to Dubai. (Walsh declined to comment.)

Further inquiries confirmed more of Shamsa’s story. A customs officer described
receiving a call from a helicopter pilot of Sheikh Mohammed’s around midnight on
the date of Shamsa’s abduction. He was giving notice of a flight from Dalham
Hall to France the following morning. According to another pilot, he’d confided
that the trip had to be handled discreetly, because the family “did not want
anyone in the U.K. to be involved.”



When Beck drove out to Dalham Hall to interview Sheikh Mohammed’s staff, he was
met by an attorney who politely told him that no one was prepared to speak with
him. “That was the first clue I had that things probably wouldn’t go as smoothly
as I would like,” he said. Beck had by then identified a fourth suspect in
Shamsa’s abduction: Mohammed Al Shaibani, a sleek, cultivated man who served as
the president of the Dubai royal family’s private office in the U.K. Al Shaibani
called him not long afterward, cordially offering assistance. When Beck told him
that he was a suspect in the investigation, he quickly hung up. (Al Shaibani
denies involvement in the abduction and being told he was a suspect.)

Behind the scenes, the Sheikh’s office was lobbying the British government over
the inquiry. Beck heard from an official at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office
named Duncan Norman, who requested a report. The detective was wary—he had
always disliked “the world of secret handshakes,” he told me—and conveyed only
the broad outlines of the case. Norman wanted more information. In his notes,
Beck wrote, “He has since told me that the Foreign Secretary has been asked to
be kept informed of any developments.”

Norman, who went on to become a senior diplomat, told me he did not recall
Shamsa’s case. Sir William Patey, who was then the head of the Middle East
Department at the Foreign Office, also said he had no memory of Shamsa—but he
acknowledged that the government was leery of anything that might antagonize
Dubai’s ruling family. “The U.A.E. are major trading partners, a strategic
ally,” he said. “Mohammed bin Rashid is a big racing buddy of our late departed
Queen. They’ve got interests here, we want to encourage investment here, and
we’d rather that their family-honor issues were not litigated here.”

At the end of the year, news of Beck’s investigation leaked to the Guardian. The
paper reported that Shamsa had given detectives an account of her abduction over
the phone. Soon afterward, Shamsa lost all contact with the outside world and
was placed under heavy sedation. “It was a very hard day for me,” Latifa later
wrote.



Beck trawled back through his notes as he figured out what to do next. In one
memorandum, he had cited another incident that drew the attention of the British
government in the year of Shamsa’s disappearance. That April, there had been a
separate “kidnap scare” involving Emirati royals in the U.K.

Sheikha Bouchra bint Mohammed Al Maktoum made her London début in the spring of
2000. A Moroccan woman of twenty-seven with waist-length auburn hair, she had
married Sheikh Maktoum—Mohammed’s brother, who was three decades her senior—when
she was still a teen-ager. With greater maturity had come a growing frustration
with the limitations of life in Dubai.

Bouchra installed herself and her three young sons in a white stucco mansion
block in Belgravia’s Lowndes Square and gave an interview to hello! Magazine,
signalling her mission: “I want the women in my country to have the courage to
show what they can do.” The interview was splashed across seven pages, with
photography of Bouchra reclining on gold upholstery in tight white jeans and
patent-leather boots.

Bouchra was a painter, and she hired a P.R. man named Nick Hewer to stage a
grand exhibition of her work, followed by an auction to raise money for Doctors
Without Borders. She told Hewer that she hoped her increased prominence in the
West would bolster her husband against the encroachments of his powerful younger
brother—“the Beard,” as she called Sheikh Mohammed. “He’s pushing my husband
into the shade,” she kept protesting.

Bouchra imagined that the exhibition would be thronged by wealthy Emiratis who
would pay generously for her paintings. The centerpiece was a jewel-encrusted
landscape she called “La Nature,” depicting a mountain stream studded with
topazes, aquamarines, and green garnets, beneath diamond stars. But “La Nature”
fetched just nine thousand pounds—money that Bouchra had apparently given to her
hairdresser’s boyfriend to drive up the bidding. Not one of the Emirati invitees
turned up. That, Hewer recalled, was an early sign that Bouchra was in trouble.

After the auction, her behavior seemed increasingly untethered. Once, she
invited Hewer to her mansion on the Avenue Foch in Paris, emerging in skintight
silver overalls to take him to the cabaret Le Lido, with her three young sons in
tow. He watched in horror as the table was surrounded by burlesque dancers in
rhinestone jockstraps and nipple tassels, while Bouchra’s Emirati security
guards averted their eyes. “It was the most inappropriate thing,” Hewer said.

Bouchra seemed to be calibrating her behavior to draw attention. When Hewer
visited her in private, he found her “very demure, quiet, graceful,” with an
unaffected tenderness toward her boys. In public, though, “she made a little bit
of a display of herself.”

One day in April, Hewer received a panicked call from Bouchra’s younger brother,
who had been visiting her in London: “The Sheikha has been kidnapped!” Bouchra
was already at Farnborough Airport, on Sheikh Maktoum’s private jet, and Emirati
guards had come for her sons. In the background, Hewer said, he could hear “all
kinds of ruckus,” as the children’s nanny struggled with the men.

The incident led to a standoff at the airport. The nanny called the police to
report the boys kidnapped; Scotland Yard tracked them to the runway, and the
plane was held. Patrick Nixon, who was then Britain’s Ambassador to the U.A.E.,
told me he received a call from an Emirati diplomat, demanding that he “get in
touch with the police and tell them to clear off.” Nixon refused, suggesting
that the diplomat take up his complaint with the Foreign Office. Soon afterward,
the plane was allowed to leave. According to one former civil servant, officials
at the Foreign Office viewed any such incident as “another family dispute in
which the Emiratis are playing fast and loose.” He added that Bouchra’s
kidnapping would have been considered “a forty-eight-hour wonder”—a short-term
annoyance. After the plane took off, “the woman would have been incommunicado,”
so “there wouldn’t be much pressure to do anything.”



When the Daily Telegraph reported on the standoff the following day, Scotland
Yard dismissed it as “a rather big domestic.” A spokesperson said at the time
that officers had “quickly established that the children were safe,” and that
the whole imbroglio was merely “a misunderstanding among relatives.” Later,
though, Nixon heard from sources in the Emirates that Bouchra had been “locked
up in a villa in Dubai.” A person with ties to the royal family confirmed this
to me: “They made her house prisoner, and they would just keep drugging her with
tranquillizers to say that she’s crazy.”



In 2007, the year after her husband died and Sheikh Mohammed took over as ruler,
rumors spread through palace circles that Bouchra had died. She was thirty-four.
Some said she had slipped away in her sleep. But, in the video that Latifa
recorded before her own escape, she accused her father. “Her behavior was too
outrageous,” she said. “He felt threatened by her, so he just killed her.” She
repeated the claim in several letters to friends. In one, she said Bouchra had
been beaten to death by her father’s guards.

Sheikh Mohammed’s attorneys deny this, but Latifa’s account was supported by two
sources close to the royal family. “They had no mercy,” one said. “They killed
her because she was a problem for them. She was a strong woman who would stand
for her rights.” A former member of the Sheikh’s personal staff told me, “She
was killed off. Here one minute, gone the next.”

Years later, Hewer got a text message from an unfamiliar number in Dubai. One of
Bouchra’s sons was getting married, it said, and the wedding present that would
mean the most to him was a painting by his mother. Hewer wrote back to ask if
his former client was alive. “Mama Bouchra had pass away in 2007,” came the
reply, accompanied by a broken heart. “May her beautiful soul rest in peace.”
Hewer had held on to “La Nature.” He packed up the painting nobody had wanted
and mailed it to the one person who did.

In the spring of 2002, almost two years after Shamsa’s abduction, David Beck
finally received a statement from Al Shaibani, the president of the Dubai royal
family’s U.K. office. In prim English, he confirmed driving to Dalham Hall with
the three men Shamsa had named as her kidnappers, but denied that she was in the
car. “The journey was uneventful,” he wrote. “I recall some general conversation
about falcons.” Soon after they arrived, he said, he had left to pick up a
takeout meal, and returned to find that “a lady was present.”

Al Shaibani claimed not to know the woman, but wrote that she “appeared
confident, cheerful and rather loud. Indeed I formed the view that she had been
drinking.” The following morning, he watched her depart by helicopter. If this
indeed was Shamsa, he stated, “she was not taken from Dalham Hall against her
will.”

Beck decided that he needed to interview Shamsa in person, and applied for
clearance to travel to Dubai. Officials at the Crown Prosecution Service
(C.P.S.) told him that his request would have to pass through the Foreign
Office. Several weeks later, he heard that permission had been refused.


Sheikha Bouchra’s life style breached the strictures of Sheikh Mohammed’s
circle.Photo illustration by Joan Wong; Source photographs from Getty;
Shutterstock

The news was infuriating, but Beck told me he had half expected it. “Because
you’re a rich and powerful person, you can effectively break any law you want in
our country,” he said. Ben Gunn, the chief constable of the Cambridgeshire
police at the time, told me Beck had gathered “clear evidence” that Shamsa had
been “kidnapped off the street,” but the case stalled. “Politics intervened,” he
suspected.

The Foreign Office has always insisted that it does not interfere in law
enforcement; a spokesperson declined to respond to detailed questions about
Shamsa’s case. Officials have refused to produce files related to the
investigation, arguing that doing so would “reduce the UK government’s ability
to protect and promote UK interests.”



Raj Joshi, who led the C.P.S. division handling international prosecutions at
the time of Beck’s request, said that his work was routinely impeded by the
Foreign Office. “They would stick their oar in every month or so,” he told me.
Though he was not involved in Shamsa’s case, Joshi considered the curtailment of
Beck’s investigation “an affront to justice.” He told me, “It’s really galling
that we allow economic and other interests to ride roughshod over what is
right.”

I spoke to Beck by Zoom last October. Long retired, he is living quietly with
his wife in a seaside town in Yorkshire. “Powers that were out of my control
influenced the course of what happened,” he told me. Yet he had never attempted
to speak to two of the suspects Shamsa named: Grant Osborne and David Walsh,
both of whom lived in Britain. And he accepted the outcome without protest.
“Those sorts of decisions are taken way above my pay grade,” he told me, with a
shrug. “You’ve just got to go with it.”

In the following years, Britain’s relationship with Dubai grew still closer.
Sheikh Mohammed funnelled hundreds of millions of pounds into British horse
racing. He appeared often at the Queen’s side at Ascot, joining her in the Royal
Box and even travelling to the event in her carriage, at the head of the royal
procession.

“Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid always had a soft ride because of the Newmarket
connection, to put it rather crudely,” Nixon, the former Ambassador, told me.
“Money talks,” he added. “He gets whatever he wants.”

One Saturday in June, 2001, Detective Chief Inspector Colin Sutton was at home
in Surrey when he received a call from the dispatch room. A serious crime had
been reported on Sheikh Mohammed’s Longcross Estate: a twenty-year-old sex
worker said she had been picked up in London by a chauffeur and driven to the
property, where she claimed to have been held captive and repeatedly raped by a
member of the Dubai royal family.

Sutton set out to investigate, but then he received a second call, from a
colleague in Special Branch. The matter had been cleared up “government to
government,” Sutton said his colleague told him. “We had this woman who had
finally been released after days of being subjected to all sorts of abuse in
this house, and we were just sort of told, ‘Don’t worry about it, she’s been
paid for her time, and Her Majesty’s favorite sport will carry on in this
country,’ ” Sutton told me.

Surrey police say that officers were dispatched to Longcross to investigate,
accessing the property with the help of Special Branch, but the alleged rapist’s
identity could not be confirmed, and no charges were brought. A spokesperson
said that the inquiry was thorough, with no evidence of government meddling. But
several former senior Foreign Office officials told me that criminal complaints
about Gulf royals in the U.K. were often managed out of public view.

Three chauffeurs who worked for the Dubai royal family for years told me that
they were regularly sent out to pick up sex workers from across London and bring
them to Dalham Hall when Sheikh Mohammed and his entourage were in residence.
They said that groups of women were collected from London’s Carlton Tower hotel,
which is owned by Dubai’s ruler. Some were experienced professionals, but others
were young women in their late teens and early twenties who had been recruited
by scouts in night clubs, or were making money to fund their studies. The women
were not told where they were going, and their phones were taken away before
they went inside the house. The drivers couldn’t say exactly what happened
there, or who was involved, but when it was finished they were called back to
take the women away.



One of the drivers is an owlish man in his mid-seventies named Djuro Sinobad,
who moved to England from Serbia and worked as a chauffeur at Newmarket for
seventeen years, until the end of 2020. He told me that some of the younger
women he drove became distressed when they realized what was expected of them.
One, he recalled, ran off into the grounds of Dalham Hall half clothed, pursued
by a member of Sheikh Mohammed’s staff, who followed her into the bushes and
beat her with a stick. “She was in a state of shock,” he told me. “There were
marks on her back where he had been hitting her.” Returning to London, he said,
she cried all the way.



On another occasion, Sinobad said, he brought a group of women back to the
Carlton Tower in the early morning. All disembarked but one—“a young, sweet
English girl.” When he went to check on her, she, too, was crying, and there was
blood on her seat. “She was shivering, like somebody who cries but doesn’t cry
loud,” he said. “Like a dog.”

Trevor Holtby, a second longtime driver, told me, “Some of the women didn’t like
what they were having to do.” But another chauffeur, Godwin Nimrod, said that
the women seemed content and well compensated. “The envelopes were fat,” he
said. “When they were in the back of the car, you can hear them flipping through
the fifties.” A chauffeur at the Carlton Tower told me, “It made me
uncomfortable, but no one was forcing them in handcuffs to go into the room.”

This pattern was not limited to the U.K. A former bodyguard who travelled with
Sheikh Mohammed said that groups of women were brought into the hotel suite
where the ruler was sequestered with his entourage almost every night, wherever
he stayed. In Dubai, a source close to the royal family recalled seeing Sheikh
Mohammed in his private quarters in the Zabeel Palace, reclining with some
twenty young women. (Several of the former staffers I spoke to lost their jobs,
under conditions that they felt were unfair. Sinobad has filed a
wrongful-dismissal suit. Sheikh Mohammed’s attorneys deny that he exploited sex
workers.)

Yet some considered Sheikh Mohammed’s proclivities moderate by comparison with
those of his older brother. When Sheikh Maktoum travelled to the U.K. on his
private jet, he brought along underage girls, several of the drivers said. They
would be deposited at addresses around Knightsbridge and given spending money.
Sinobad and Holtby both told me they had brought girls from these lodgings to
Sheikh Maktoum’s residence. Some carried dolls and Teddy bears, they said.
Holtby remembers collecting girls who travelled in their nighties.

Both men said these jobs made them sick, but they couldn’t afford to quit. When
they complained to managers, they were taken off Sheikh Maktoum’s detail, but
they still saw young girls come and go. Nimrod said, “All the drivers knew he
had these girls, and they were underage.”

I met Nimrod and Sinobad at a pub in Knightsbridge on a freezing afternoon in
January. Nimrod, a small, bespectacled man, wore a woolly hat against the
weather. Sinobad had on a blue cable-knit sweater. The two drivers sipped brandy
and shared memories of Sheikh Mohammed, who they said had treated them kindly,
sometimes inviting them to eat from his own table once he had finished his meal.
“Sheikh Mo is a nice man,” Nimrod said. “He’d say hello. He wouldn’t pass you.”

At first, Sinobad agreed. But as Nimrod recounted more of their former
employer’s benefactions, he grew flustered. “This is all to cover the nasty part
of the character,” Sinobad said. “They are no good, especially with the women
and the young girls.” He was pensive for a while. “It’s hard to see them crying
in the back of the car,” he said.

One night in June, 2002, Latifa took a pair of scissors and cropped her long
hair to the scalp. She covered her clothes with an abaya, pulled on a pair of
blue-gray Skechers, and packed a bag with cash, water, wire cutters, and a
knuckle knife. Then she crept out of her mother’s house and jumped the wall. She
was sixteen, and it was the first time she had ever been out alone. Her plan,
she later wrote, was to “cross over to Oman without being noticed” and “find a
lawyer over there to help my imprisoned sister.”

Latifa caught a taxi to an area near the border, where she stopped a passing
cyclist and persuaded him to sell her his bicycle. She rode on as the sun rose
over the desert, until she reached a fence and cut the wire to squeeze through.
When an Army car pulled up beside her, she kept moving, but before she got far
men in camouflage gear jumped out and bundled her into the back.



Latifa was taken to a police station, where she was met by a “toadish” man who
worked for her father. He took her home, where, she recalled, she was beaten
until blood poured from her nose. Her mother watched, she wrote: “She was
dressed up with a face full of makeup and frosty lilac lipstick as if she was
expecting my father to visit.”

When the beating was over, Latifa was put back in the car and driven to a desert
prison. Inside, she was taken to a cell and told to remove her shoes. Then one
guard held her down while another battered the soles of her feet with a heavy
wooden cane. “He could not have beaten me harder than he did,” she wrote in a
detailed account of her imprisonment. The next torture session lasted five hours
and left her unable to walk; she had to drag herself along the floor to drink
from a tap next to the toilet. She squeezed her broken feet back into her
Skechers, hoping they would act as a cast, and slept with them on. She was
awakened by guards dragging her out of bed for more beatings. (The Sheikh’s
attorneys deny that he mistreated or imprisoned Latifa.)

Latifa was in captivity for thirteen months. She slept on a thin bloodstained
mattress, in the same clothes she had worn since her escape. She had no soap or
toothbrush. Sometimes the lights were switched off for days, so she had to
navigate her cell in the dark. “I was treated worse than any animal,” she wrote.

One day, in July, 2003, she was pulled from her cell and put in a waiting
vehicle. “I had not moved for one year and one month, so the car felt like I was
in a rollercoaster,” she wrote. She was taken home, where, she recalled, her
mother greeted her as if nothing had happened. But when Latifa looked in the
mirror she was horrified by the sight of her hollow eyes and jutting hip bones.
For a week, she showered five times a day, luxuriating in the soap and the fresh
towels. Then she blew up. “I was so sad, angry and heartbroken,” she wrote. She
screamed over and over that she wanted to see Shamsa. Eventually, she said, she
was tranquillized and taken away. After that, she was locked up for two more
years.



She got out in October, 2005, just before her twentieth birthday—a few months
before her father became Dubai’s official ruler. For years, Latifa trusted no
one. “I spent a lot of time with animals, with the horses, with the dogs, with
cats, with birds,” she recalled in her escape video. She was forbidden to leave
Dubai and accompanied everywhere by guards—sometimes the same ones who had caned
her in prison. “If I heard a slight sound I would jump up from my sleep,
preparing to get dragged and beaten,” she wrote.

Shamsa came home from prison three years after Latifa. “She’s only a shell of
her former self, with all the will power tortured out of her,” Latifa wrote.
Shamsa had attempted suicide three times: slashing her wrists, overdosing, and
trying to set fire to her cell. She had been released after staging a hunger
strike. Now she was given tranquillizers and antidepressants that left her “like
a zombie.” At first, Latifa wrote, Shamsa wasn’t comfortable opening her eyes,
because she had lain in the dark for so long. She had to be led around by the
hand.

The sisters’ reunion was agonizing. Latifa struggled to forgive Shamsa the
lapses of judgment that had led to her capture. “I almost died and ruined my
life for her and I’m still upset that she was so reckless,” she wrote. “But at
the same time she has no-one else who’ll fight for her.”

“If only every summer were autumn, and every autumn spring, and every late
spring summer, and every winter only the holiday season, then I think I might
finally be happy.”
Cartoon by Erika Sjule
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Latifa decided to make one final bid to save herself and her sister. “I must
identify every possible single point of failure and have a plan for every
scenario that can go awry,” she wrote. “If I get caught in the act I’m not
willing to submit to more years of torture, dehumanization and hopelessness,”
she declared. “For me it’s liberte ou mort, absolutely nothing, nothing in
between.”

In November, 2010, Tiina Jauhiainen was working at a martial-arts school in
Dubai when she received an e-mail from Latifa, asking for capoeira lessons.
Jauhiainen was directed to the Zabeel Club, a private recreation complex beside
Sheikh Mohammed’s palace. Latifa arrived accompanied by guards, who swept the
club before she entered to make sure no men were present. She struck Jauhiainen
as unassuming, wary of eye contact. But once they were alone in the club, an
echoing space surrounded by portraits of Sheikh Mohammed and favored children,
she threw herself into the training.

Latifa wanted to work out punishingly every day, Jauhiainen told me; she seemed
determined to become stronger and more agile. At first she was too proud to show
exhaustion, but eventually she began to admit when she couldn’t go on, and then
the two women would order food and talk.



Latifa appeared to be steeped in extraordinary privilege, living from leisure
appointment to leisure appointment. “How perfect,” Jauhiainen thought. Yet the
princess was enraptured by the quotidian details of her instructor’s life. She
liked to ply Jauhiainen with fruits she’d never tried, such as custard apples
and star fruit, while asking questions.

Jauhiainen grew up on a flower farm in central Finland, in a tiny settlement
bounded by more than a hundred lakes. While her parents tended their tulips, the
work of caring for her younger siblings fell to her. She left as soon as she
could, studying in London before moving to Dubai in 2001. The rootlessness of
the place appealed to her, and she lived in a series of furnished high-rise
apartments, cherishing the sense that she could “easily pack two bags and walk
out” anytime she pleased. Yet ten years later she was still there.

The relationship with Latifa soon filled Jauhiainen’s life. She had been working
in sales while moonlighting at the martial-arts school, but she agreed to quit
her day job so that they could train full time. Then Latifa asked if they could
start skydiving together, too. At their first class, Latifa was the only student
who jumped solo. After that, Jauhiainen said, she made “jump after jump after
jump, like crazy.” Latifa started wingsuit flying, and tumbling out of hot-air
balloons. She had taken a similarly fevered approach to scuba training, racking
up thousands of dives.

“She was my reason for still being in Dubai,” Jauhiainen told me. Still, much of
Latifa’s life remained a mystery. “Why all that intensity?” she wondered.
Jauhiainen gathered that her friend was allowed to pursue approved hobbies but
forbidden to leave Dubai, or to go out unchaperoned. When she questioned these
constraints, Latifa deflected her. After a few years, she began to be allowed to
meet Latifa alone—but even then she had no idea of the role for which she was
being recruited.

As Latifa had refined her plans, she had got hold of a book called “Escape from
Dubai,” in which a man named Herve Jaubert described how he had fled the
Emirates by using scuba gear and a rubber dinghy to reach a getaway boat in
international waters. She read it and tracked Jaubert down, sending him an
e-mail to ask for help. “I’ve begun my planning for emancipation many years
ago,” she wrote, declaring that she was unafraid of water, skilled in extreme
sports, and ready to undertake whatever training might be necessary. If he
agreed to extract her by sea, she knew that she’d need help reaching the
rendezvous. “I’ll organize a lady to chaperone,” she said, assuring him, “It
shouldn’t be difficult.”

Jaubert was a French American marine engineer and former naval officer in his
fifties, who had left Dubai to escape embezzlement charges, which he insisted
were false. He claimed to have worked undercover in the French secret service,
and he cultivated an air of mystery, augmented by shiny black hair, coarse
stubble, and a heavy French accent. At first, he was skeptical about Latifa’s
identity, but, in a series of e-mails, she supplied details of her life.
Eventually, he agreed to help her, for a price.

Latifa and Jaubert corresponded for more than seven years. In that time, by her
calculation, she sent him more than five hundred thousand dollars. She was not
allowed to have a bank account, so she saved the funds from pocket money,
evading her chaperone on shopping trips to pass bundles of cash to Jaubert’s
envoys. Sometimes his demands weighed heavily. “I’m really struggling with this
and feel like a hamster on a wheel,” she wrote to him in 2014. She promised to
send him a jewel worth more than fifty thousand dollars, but told him, “You need
to meet me halfway on this because after I give this diamond I have nothing
left.” (Jaubert told me any funds he received from Latifa were just to cover his
expenses. This was a “human-rights rescue,” he said, so it was important that he
not be seen to have profited if they got caught. “She would pay me after,” he
reasoned.)

Latifa envisaged an array of swashbuckling escape scenarios, by seaplane, combat
boat, helicopter, private jet, and underwater scooter. She studied what Jaubert
called “spy stuff”: encryption, countersurveillance, escape routes, disguises.
She even managed to obtain a fake Irish passport, which she guarded carefully,
strapping it under her dry suit when she went diving.

One spring, Latifa hoped she might be allowed to travel to England during racing
season, and sent Jaubert Google Earth imagery of the Longcross Estate, to look
for an extraction point. The grounds appeared impenetrable, so they planned a
fake kidnapping, in which Jaubert would snatch Latifa from her bodyguards while
she was out shopping. But when the racing party left for England she was told to
stay behind.



In the end, she and Jaubert agreed to replicate his escape route. Jaubert bought
a U.S.-flagged yacht—named Nostromo—as well as Jet Skis and a set of satellite
navigators. He identified a rendezvous point sixteen miles off the coast of
Oman. Latifa planned to cross the border by underwater scooter, using a scuba
rebreather, then take a dinghy to the boat. They would sail to India or Sri
Lanka, and Latifa would use her fake passport to fly to the U.S.

Latifa agonized over how she could bring Shamsa. “They give her sedatives as
well as psychiatric drugs every single day,” she told Jaubert; “her mind is
fragile and I don’t trust that she won’t freak out.” Then, without warning,
Shamsa made her own move.

It had been seventeen years since Shamsa had run away. She was now thirty-six.
Evading the scrutiny of her guards, she had obtained another secret cell
phone—and, in the spring of 2017, she contacted the Cambridgeshire police. Beck
was long retired, so a new detective retrieved Shamsa’s file. But Superintendent
Adam Gallop said in a statement that, despite some “new lines of enquiry,” the
evidence was insufficient to pursue such a “uniquely challenging and complex
case.” Soon after, Shamsa’s rooms were searched, and her phone was confiscated.
She was placed in a separate wing of the residence, and her sedatives were
increased, Latifa said.

Latifa felt that she couldn’t wait any longer for her sister. She explained in
her escape video, “The only way I can help myself, I can help her, I can help a
lot of people, is to leave.” Latifa asked Jauhiainen to meet her for lunch at a
restaurant called Saladicious, a few blocks from the sea. It was quiet and she
chose a table in the corner. When they sat down, Latifa told her friend
everything that had happened since Shamsa first fled. By the time she finished,
both women were in tears. “I felt so much anger towards the people who had done
it to her,” Jauhiainen told me. So when Latifa finally briefed her on the plan
to escape she replied without hesitation: “I’m ready to go.”

One Saturday in February, 2018, Latifa left her mother’s mansion at sunrise and
told her driver to take her to meet Jauhiainen at a café on Sheikh Mohammed bin
Rashid Boulevard. While Jauhiainen ordered coffee to go, Latifa went into the
bathroom, removed her abaya, and dropped her cell phone in the sanitary bin.
Then the two women hurried into a borrowed Audi Q7 and headed for the border.

Since agreeing to help free Latifa, Jauhiainen had been meeting with Jaubert in
Manila, where he lived, finessing the escape plan and delivering cash to settle
his expenses, along with a set of diamond jewelry that she said Latifa planned
to sell when she reached America. Jauhiainen travelled to Indonesia, Sri Lanka,
the U.S., and Singapore to make preparations and assemble equipment: a dinghy
motor, scuba gear, Garmin satellite navigators, and two powerful underwater
scooters. But, practicing the subaquatic swim in her mother’s pool, Latifa had
felt dangerously dizzy, so Jauhiainen had proposed an alternative plan.



In a quiet area close to Oman, the two women pulled over and opened the trunk.
They lifted out several large blue bags of IKEA flat-pack furniture, and Latifa
climbed into the empty spare-tire compartment. Jauhiainen pulled down the cover
and piled the bags on top. At the border, twenty minutes on, they passed through
a series of checkpoints before guards opened the trunk. Jauhiainen’s heart
hammered, until they slammed the lid shut and waved her on.

By the time Jauhiainen cleared the border and stopped the car, she expected to
find her friend blue-lipped and lifeless. But Latifa leaped out, fizzing with
excitement. The two women snapped selfies, grinning in hoodies and reflective
shades, as they drove on toward the sea.

They met another accomplice, Christian Elombo, in a suburb of Muscat, Oman’s
coastal capital. Elombo was Jauhiainen’s own former capoeira instructor, a
powerfully built Frenchman in his early forties. He had never met Latifa, but
when Jauhiainen had explained her friend’s plight, he thought for “two seconds”
before agreeing to help, he told me. “I knew my conscience would not let me
think that there’s something that I could have done and I haven’t done.”



It had been Elombo’s idea to hide Latifa in the spare-tire compartment of a car,
and his Audi that they had used for the escape. His last job was to convey the
two women out to Nostromo aboard a rubber dinghy. When they reached the beach,
though, fishermen urged him to turn back. A storm was coming, and huge waves
were crashing along the shore. The three pressed on, casting the dinghy out into
the churn. Elombo took the tiller, while Jauhiainen navigated and sent
coördinates to Jaubert. Latifa clung to the sides of the craft as it pitched
violently and took on water.

The rough seas made for slow progress. When it became clear that the dinghy
wouldn’t reach the yacht before dark, Jaubert and another crew member set out by
Jet Ski to meet it. The two women were repeatedly thrown into the waves as they
struggled to clamber on. Once they were safely astride, Elombo waved goodbye.
“See you next time!” he called.

Back on shore, Elombo went out for seafood, planning to dispose of the evidence
and hide out in Europe. But when he set off to dump the dinghy his car was
surrounded by armed police officers. “If you sneeze, they’re gonna shoot you,”
he thought. Elombo was taken to the solitary wing of an Omani jail, where he
would be held for two months. Soon, officials arrived to interrogate him.

Latifa and Jauhiainen reached Nostromo at sunset, too exhausted and nauseated by
the journey to celebrate. Still, Latifa wrote a triumphant farewell to her
mother and siblings, and soon posted a message on Instagram declaring her
freedom: “I have escaped UAE after being trapped for 18 years.”

But Latifa and Jauhiainen quickly began losing faith in their captain. The boat
was filthy, Jauhiainen said, and their supplies were riddled with cockroaches.
They subsisted on porridge, boiled potatoes, and beans. “His mind was always on
money and profit,” Latifa wrote about Jaubert.

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Soon after setting out, Jaubert contacted a lawyer in Florida and asked her to
draw up a “settlement agreement,” demanding three hundred million dollars from
Sheikh Mohammed on Latifa’s behalf. Because Latifa did not have a bank account,
he wrote, the money “should be transferred directly to my account in the
Philippines.” He would split it evenly with Latifa and Jauhiainen, he promised.
Latifa told Jauhiainen that she had gone along with the plan just to appease
Jaubert, knowing that her father would never pay. (Jaubert denied pressuring
Latifa; he said that the settlement had been her idea, and that his share was to
serve as payment for aiding her escape.)

After a week at sea, thirty miles off the coast of India, Nostromo was low on
fuel. “I am running out,” Jaubert texted a friend; in a “couple of days” the
tank would be empty. (Jaubert told me that he had enough fuel to reach the
original destination but feared they would have to change routes. He also
insisted that his boat was “immaculate” and that cockroaches are an inevitable
part of seafaring.)

When they learned that Elombo had been arrested, Latifa seemed to freeze. “It
became so tense, so stressful,” Jauhiainen told me. “We were not talking to each
other, because it was just, like, nobody’s responding, we have no plan, we’re
running out of petrol.”

On Jaubert’s recommendation, Latifa reached out to a group called Detained in
Dubai, begging for help in publicizing her case. “The time is ticking and they
have a target on my head,” she wrote. Two human-rights campaigners at the
organization, David Haigh and Radha Stirling, set about verifying Latifa’s
identity. Then, one night in early March, Stirling received a string of panicked
messages: “Please help. Please please there’s men outside.” When she texted
back, she got no reply.



Sheikh Mohammed had faced few difficulties in finding his fleeing daughter. Her
communications had been intercepted, and at the U.A.E.’s request Interpol had
issued Red Notices for her accomplices, accusing them of kidnapping her. When
the yacht was located, off the Goa coast, Sheikh Mohammed spoke with the Indian
Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, and agreed to extradite a Dubai-based arms dealer
in exchange for his daughter’s capture. The Indian government deployed boats,
helicopters, and a team of armed commandos to storm Nostromo and carry Latifa
away.

Lamorna Cove in Cornwall is a tiny nook on the westernmost tip of England, where
rough surf breaks along a crescent shore. The area is a destination for summer
vacationers, and in the off-season its smattering of granite cottages mostly
stand vacant. But on the night of March 4, 2018, the lights of one house shone
over the water.

Its occupant, David Haigh, was an incongruous figure in rural Cornwall: tall and
athletic, in his early forties, with a year-round tan and sculpted blond hair.
Haigh had formerly worked for a Gulf-based investment firm, but his employers
accused him of fraud and slander, and he’d spent nearly two years in Dubai
jails. Though he later testified that he had been beaten, raped, and forced to
sign an Arabic document that appeared to be a confession, the conviction hung
over him, and he was still fighting a freeze on his assets. Since his release,
two years earlier, he had retreated to Lamorna, and from there he had signed up
to help Detained in Dubai.

On the phone, he and Radha Stirling grappled with Latifa’s messages. “It’s a
hostage situation,” Haigh said. “What do we do?” They filed a missing-persons
report with Scotland Yard, and notified the Indian Coast Guard that a
U.S.-flagged yacht had vanished. But no authority would take up the case, so
they reached out to the police and to palace representatives in Dubai. Stirling
told me that they hoped to send a message: “We know this has happened,
we’re watching, so don’t start executing them all.”

Days went by with no news. Then the campaigners received an e-mail from the
lawyer in Florida, containing Latifa’s escape video, with instructions to
release it. “If you are watching this video, it’s not such a good thing. Either
I’m dead or I’m in a very, very, very bad situation,” she said to the camera.
“What do I talk about? Do I talk about all the murders? Do I talk about all the
abuse I’ve seen?”



Haigh’s mouth fell open. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” he said. “This is a
nuclear bomb.” He and Stirling released clips of the video to the media and
uploaded it to YouTube.

Soon, several newspapers picked up the story of Dubai’s runaway princess. Sheikh
Mohammed gave no comment, but the campaigners received word of Jauhiainen and
Jaubert. Nostromo had been escorted to the U.A.E., where the pair were
interrogated for more than a week. After the video was published, they were
released, and made their way to London, where they held a press conference
alongside Stirling and Haigh. “I am here speaking about my friend, because we
have to get her freed,” Jauhiainen told a room full of journalists. “The
international community must take action.”

Haigh’s seafront cottage became a command center for the campaign to free
Latifa. The group reported her abduction to the United Nations. Then they
contacted the BBC and began making a documentary about the escape. It aired in
December, 2018, coinciding with Latifa’s thirty-third birthday. Finally, the
Dubai government released a response, saying that Latifa had not tried to
escape, but had been kidnapped by Jaubert. “Her Highness Sheikha Latifa is now
safe in Dubai,” it said. “She and her family are looking forward to celebrating
her birthday today, in privacy and peace.”

In fact, Latifa had passed her birthday in captivity. After disappearing
overboard on Nostromo, she had been dragged onto an Indian naval boat, then
aboard a helicopter and onto a private jet. She was given tranquillizers twice,
she recalled in an account written in detention, but the drugs seemed to produce
no effect. When an Emirati lieutenant tried to pull her off the helicopter, she
sank her teeth into his arm. Only after a third dose did she feel herself losing
consciousness.

“I want them to be embarrassed that it took the navy, several warships, armed
commandos, 3 tranquillizer injections and an hour long struggle to put an
unarmed pint-sized woman on a jet,” Latifa wrote. She regained consciousness in
Dubai. “I remember tears just streaming down my face,” she wrote. “It was the
worst feeling in the world. To be back in the hell hole after being so close to
freedom.”



Latifa was taken to a desert prison named Al Awir and placed in a cell with
blacked-out windows. At first her jailers were callous, but, once her video
testimony was released, they began pleading with her to recant. For a while,
they served her food on gilded plates. “They are extremely ridiculous,” she
wrote.

As the news of her capture spread, Latifa came under increasing pressure to help
quash concerns about her safety. After the BBC aired an interview with
Jauhiainen, in May, two policewomen arrived with a fresh outfit for her, and
took her to the Zabeel Club to meet Sheikh Mohammed. Her eyes were swollen with
tears, and her father told her to wash her face. “I hope you can see that you
are valuable to us,” she remembered him telling her. He instructed an attendant
to take a photograph, but Latifa hung her head. “Why aren’t you smiling?” he
asked. When she didn’t reply, she said, her father stalked out, and she was
taken back to prison.

Later that month, Latifa was moved to a villa of her own. When she arrived, she
noted “the unnaturally high walls and cameras,” and found that all the windows
were barred shut. Five policemen patrolled the exterior, and two policewomen
were stationed in the house. Inside, she found Caroline Faraj, the
editor-in-chief of CNN Arabic. Faraj asked Latifa to pose for a photograph and
to appear in a video. “Let the world know you are alive,” she said. Latifa
refused, saying that she was being held prisoner. Faraj went on to publish a
story which led with a statement from the family that Latifa was being “cared
for at home” but made no mention of their own encounter. (CNN maintains that
Faraj was told the meeting was off the record.)

For six months, Latifa had no visitors. In September, she staged a twenty-day
hunger strike, but it drew no response. Finally, on December 6th, she heard a
knock on her bedroom door. It was Princess Haya, Sheikh Mohammed’s youngest
wife, laden with gifts. Latifa was pale and looked “vulnerable,” Haya later
said. “She opened the door, looked at me, embraced me, and burst into tears.” A
week later, Haya reappeared and invited her to lunch the following day. Latifa
understood that if she “behaved well” she would be freed.

Haya picked her up the next afternoon and took her to a gated palace. Inside,
Latifa was introduced to Mary Robinson, the former U.N. High Commissioner for
Human Rights and the ex-President of Ireland. Without telling Latifa, Princess
Haya, herself a former U.N. Goodwill Ambassador, had invited Robinson to assess
her condition.

Haya had brought along her own eleven-year-old daughter, Jalila, and pointed out
that she and Latifa shared a love of adventure sports. “It must be the Al
Maktoum gene,” she joked. Jalila took Latifa outside, to a kennel full of small
dogs, and they petted the animals through the bars while Haya and Robinson
watched from a distance.

Over lunch, Jalila was asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, Latifa
wrote, but “nobody spoke to me privately or asked me about my situation.” She
volunteered that she had always wanted to study medicine but had not been
allowed to attend medical school, or to leave the country since she was
fourteen. Robinson “seemed uninterested,” Latifa wrote; “she just chimed in and
shared her own stories.” After the meal, Latifa was asked to pose for
photographs. At first she declined, but, she said, Haya told her, “It’s a
once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” She assented, making sure that she didn’t
smile, because she “knew it would be used for propaganda.”

Soon afterward, the Emirati government sent the photographs to the U.N., showing
Latifa sitting next to Robinson, looking dazed and pale in a dark hoodie, citing
them as proof that Latifa was “receiving the necessary care and support.”
Robinson told the BBC at the time that Latifa was a “vulnerable” woman, who had
become embroiled in a plan involving “a very big demand note for three hundred
million dollars.” She said that Latifa was “troubled” and had “made a video that
she now regrets.” When Latifa heard of Robinson’s account of the meeting, she
was flattened. “Stayed in bed for a day in tears,” she wrote. “Felt so used.”
(Years later, Robinson said in an interview that she had been “horribly tricked”
into believing that Latifa had bipolar disorder, and hadn’t asked about her
circumstances because “I really didn’t want to talk to her and increase the
trauma over a nice lunch.”) Haya made gestures at conciliation: she sent over
gift baskets—jewelry, clothes, art supplies, books—and she visited again. But
Latifa received her frostily, and she stopped coming.

The Lamorna Cove campaigners were outraged by Robinson’s intervention. The
tension grew when Haigh accused Jaubert of attempting to sell the jewelry Latifa
had entrusted to him. Jaubert and his wife had discussed the sale of the
set—comprising nine hundred and fifty round, marquise, and pear-cut diamonds—in
a series of e-mails with potential buyers from Craigslist. “I sold the necklace
already, I have the ring, the earrings, and the bracelet,” his wife wrote in
one.

Haigh and Jauhiainen severed ties with Jaubert, but Stirling took his side. She
accused Haigh of “complete slander and harassment.” Jaubert maintains that
Latifa gave him the jewelry as part of his payment, and that most of it was
stolen by the commandos who stormed Nostromo. He denies selling the items,
saying that he listed them on Craigslist only to gauge the extent of his losses.



Haigh and Jauhiainen split into one camp, Stirling and Jaubert into another. In
the spring of 2019, with the team splintering, Jauhiainen returned to her
parents’ flower farm for a break. Then, late one night, her phone lit up with
messages from a new accomplice of Latifa’s. “Hi ms.tiina i hope u respond,” the
person wrote. “im scared to help ms.latifa but shes very kind to me.”

The accomplice asked Jauhiainen questions to check her identity before sending
her a photograph: a handwritten note from Latifa, with a graphic account of her
abduction. Over the next four weeks, Latifa wrote dozens more letters to
Jauhiainen and Haigh, chronicling her experience. “I will not allow someone to
erase almost half a decade of torture and imprisonment,” she wrote. “They attack
me with lies, I will defend myself with truths.”



From the angle of the sunrise, she had worked out the position of the U.K., and
sometimes she drew comfort from knowing her supporters were there. She
reminisced about asking Jauhiainen to sleep out under the stars with her on
board Nostromo. “We should do that in friendlier waters in a nice clean boat,”
she wrote.

By April, the campaigners had managed to smuggle a cell phone into the villa.
Latifa kept it hidden on her person, and locked herself in the bathroom with the
water running to obscure her voice. They exchanged thousands of WhatsApp
messages, and Latifa recorded dozens of voice notes documenting her ordeal. She
also filmed a series of videos, to be released if they lost contact.

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Their group chat filled with memes, travel plans, and discussions about movies,
books, and music. Latifa daydreamed about visiting Hawaii, where she had heard
there were four hundred different kinds of mangoes and “fruits that taste like
chocolate pudding and vanilla ice cream.” Haigh supplied her with a Netflix
log-in. She loved horror films, and once spooked herself badly enough that she
had to sleep with the lights on for several nights. When he sent pictures of
sunsets over the sea at Lamorna, she was so transfixed that she imagined buying
the whole cove.

Haigh battled insomnia, and often sat awake through the small hours exchanging
messages with Latifa. “It was all about keeping her mind occupied and giving her
hope,” he told me. He bought chicken eggs and hatched them in an incubator,
sending her updates on their progress—“like having a Tamagotchi,” he said. She
was so delighted that he kept going, ending up with more than forty chickens,
ducks, and peacocks, which he promised to keep for her until she was free.
Through an intermediary, she sent him a hairless, green-eyed sphynx cat. The
cat—named Sheikha, but affectionately known as Alien—became a mascot, a “mini
Latifa,” Haigh said.

By now, Latifa was steering the campaign from behind the scenes. She reviewed
filings to the U.N., designed logos, and dreamed up increasingly bold
strategies. She was, Haigh told me, “bloody bossy.” In June, Latifa seized upon
a new hope. When Sheikh Mohammed flew to the U.K. to attend Ascot, he was
photographed with the Queen and Prince William—but, for the first time in many
years, Princess Haya was not on his arm. Reports began to spread that the
ruler’s youngest wife had left him. If Haya was no longer under Sheikh
Mohammed’s control, Latifa reasoned, she could confirm that her stepdaughter was
being held against her will: “She has seen it with her own eyes.”

By the time her absence was noted at Ascot, Princess Haya had been a fugitive
for two months. In April, 2019, after her husband discovered that she was having
an affair with her bodyguard, she fled to London, settling with her two children
in a neo-Georgian mansion on Kensington Palace Gardens. That July, she launched
a legal campaign against Sheikh Mohammed, seeking court protection for herself
and her children.

In court, she cited the abuse of Shamsa and Latifa as evidence of the threat the
Sheikh posed. Haya said that she had initially believed her husband’s assurances
that Latifa had been rescued from an extortion attempt. But, when she became
inquisitive after visiting Latifa, he told her to “stop interfering.” The Sheikh
began publishing poems containing thinly veiled references to Haya. “My spirit
is cured of you, girl,” one verse ran. “When your face appears, no pleasure I
feel.” Menacing notes were left around her palace: “We will take your son—your
daughter is ours—your life is over.” More than once, she went to bed and found a
pistol on her pillow.



In March, one of Sheikh Mohammed’s helicopters landed outside her palace, and
the pilot declared he had orders to take her to the Al Awir prison. Her
seven-year-old son clung to her leg in terror; if he hadn’t, she believed, she
would have been dragged away. Even in London, she remained afraid. The Sheikh
had published more threatening poems about her, including one titled “You Lived
and Died,” and had told her that she and her children would “never be safe in
England.”

The High Court responded by making her children wards of the court, barring
their removal from the country, and instigating a fact-finding process to test
Haya’s claims. Family proceedings in Britain are generally heard in private, so
Haya’s allegations were sealed from public view, but her lawyers now had a
pretext to call Shamsa and Latifa to testify in a British court.

Latifa sent a voice message to Haigh and Jauhiainen soon afterward, sounding
panicked. “My father wants to see me,” she said. In subsequent messages, she
described being taken to Sheikh Mohammed’s office in the desert, where he met
her in a drawing room and announced that Shamsa was now free. When he left the
room, Shamsa entered. She was hard to recognize, Latifa said: bright and
energetic, full of praise for their father and Allah. Shamsa said that Sheikh
Mohammed had given her a cell phone and told her she was free to travel—but now
all she wanted to do was stay home and worship.

Latifa was flummoxed, but she allowed her older sister to hug her. She described
her capture aboard Nostromo and began to cry. Shamsa warned that the room was
likely bugged. “Just be careful, be respectful,” she whispered.

But Latifa had lost patience. “You have ten seconds,” she shouted at Shamsa.
“Tell me what you want! Because I went to prison so many times for you. I almost
died for you.”

Shamsa seemed stricken. “I’m so confused,” she said. “I feel like I want to
escape and then I want to stay.”

When Sheikh Mohammed came back in, he told Latifa that she was “precious” and
that he “wanted to start a new page.” Three days later, she and Shamsa were
again brought before their father. This time, he asked them to confirm to
lawyers that they did not want to travel to England to give evidence. Then he
left, and in came Mohammed Al Shaibani, who had become the director of the Dubai
Ruler’s Court. Latifa said that he spent four hours urging her and Shamsa to
rebuff the summons: “Tell them it’s a family matter and we’re solving it within
the family.”

Shamsa’s demeanor was dramatically changed since their previous meeting. She
sobbed, and told Al Shaibani, “Whatever happens to me, I don’t care, but I will
not hurt my sister. So whatever my sister wants I will do.” Latifa, thinking
back on the brutality of Shamsa’s confinement, regretted shouting at her. But
she told Al Shaibani that she would not coöperate while being held
incommunicado. Later, back in her villa, she heard that Shamsa’s phone had been
taken away.



Sheikh Mohammed sent a statement to the High Court, saying that he had offered
his daughters a choice about whether to testify. “Both Shamsa and Latifa were
adamant that they did not want to do this,” he wrote. He denied abducting either
woman. “To this day I consider that Latifa’s return to Dubai was a rescue
mission.” In support of his case, he filed a statement from their older sister,
Maitha, a Tae Kwon Do athlete who was among the first Emirati women to compete
in the Olympics. “My sisters Shamsa and Latifa are not imprisoned in Dubai,” she
wrote. “Shamsa lives with our mother and me. Latifa lives in her own private
residence because that is her choice, which has been accommodated. Shamsa and I
regularly spend time with Latifa.”



Back in her villa, Latifa came under renewed pressure to make it appear that she
was free. Guards offered to take her out shopping for books, so that she could
be photographed. It was an agonizing offer to refuse. “I crave fresh air and
sunlight,” she wrote. But she knew that if she coöperated she would risk
scuttling Haya’s case.

In February, 2020, Sheikh Mohammed opened the Global Women’s Forum Dubai with a
promise that his nation would “lead the world” in “women’s growth and
advancement.” Three thousand participants from more than eighty countries
assembled to hear speakers including Ivanka Trump, who praised Sheikh Mohammed’s
“steadfast commitment” to women’s advancement, and Britain’s former Prime
Minister Theresa May, who accepted a fee of a hundred and fifteen thousand
pounds to speak about gender equality. “It’s a circus,” Latifa texted Haigh. The
government rolled out a new law, enabling women to obtain restraining orders
against domestic abusers—though it stopped short of criminalizing marital rape
and preserved male guardians’ right to discipline their female charges.

As Dubai’s ruler greeted dignitaries at the forum, his private behavior was
under scrutiny in London’s High Court. Jauhiainen had testified during closed
hearings about Latifa’s violent abduction. Beck, the police inspector, had
described how his investigation into Shamsa’s disappearance was shuttered. “This
unresolved incident has remained a mystery and a source of frustration to me for
eighteen years,” he said. In the absence of direct testimony from Latifa, the
judge had accepted her escape video as witness evidence, noting that her account
had a “strong ring of truth about it.” Haya’s statements about the conditions of
Latifa’s “jail villa” were also accepted. (Princess Haya declined to comment for
this article.)

In March, the court published a detailed finding of fact, noting that Sheikh
Mohammed had used the “very substantial powers at his disposal to achieve his
particular aims”: kidnapping and imprisoning his daughters, and subjecting Haya
to “a campaign of fear and intimidation.” Sheikh Mohammed argued that the
findings were one-sided, because his position as a head of state had prevented
him from participating in the fact-finding process. The judge dismissed this as
“at least disingenuous,” noting that the Sheikh had filed two witness
statements.

For Latifa, the judgment was a vindication. And yet she seemed underwhelmed when
Haigh delivered the news. “It’s massively good for you,” he told her. “Judge
found you and Shamsa were kidnapped.”

“ok,” she replied. “i hope it gets me out . . . lets see.” She seemed
distracted, and told him her foot hurt.

It seemed her nerve was cracking. “I’m in a perpetual nightmare,” she wrote. The
guards wouldn’t even let her open the window, she said; she felt she was dying a
“very slow death” by suffocation. Then she reported that she was being visited
by a psychiatrist, who appeared alongside her father’s security officials to
pressure her to comply with his wishes.

Sheikh Mohammed had also been trying a gentler appeal. One day, a package had
arrived at the villa: a copy of his memoir, inscribed by “your father who always
loves you.” Latifa broke down. “Maybe the war is finally over,” she allowed
herself to think. Haigh said that Latifa began telling him that she was worried
about her father’s health: “He’s an old man, I should look after him.” She
fretted that revealing his abuses was a betrayal. “It was like Stockholm
syndrome,” Haigh told me.

Latifa said that she had offered a deal to one of her father’s security
officials: if she was released, “I will live my life normally and quietly and
the campaign will stop.” But a week went by and she got no response. “I honestly
feel so tired and hopeless,” she wrote. Eventually, one of her guards told her
that she must stay in captivity for another year, and gave her a stopwatch to
measure the time.



Latifa was distraught, and terrified of “losing contact and being in the dark.”
In June, her phone started to malfunction. She had read about Pegasus, the
Israeli hacking tool that allows governments to extract data from a target’s
device remotely. “I just panicked,” she wrote. “Was literally shaking.”

Haigh was alarmed. “She really is struggling,” he wrote to a lawyer involved in
the case. “I’m increasingly worried she will give up.” Latifa feared the
consequences of releasing more evidence about her father’s actions. In mid-July,
she texted Haigh that she wanted to move on, “even if I spend rest of my life in
dxb.”

“Her bravery was going down, down, down,” Haigh told me. A few days later she
sent a more resolute message. “I won’t believe I’m free until I’m on UK soil,”
she wrote, on July 21, 2020. But, after that day, he never heard from her again.

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For months, Haigh kept writing to Latifa, but received no reply. “Alien and I
miss you,” he wrote, early the following year. “We are all trying our hardest
and we haven’t given up. I hope one day some how you will see this.”

After the WhatsApp channel went silent, Jauhiainen joined Haigh in Lamorna Cove
to figure out what to do with the video evidence Latifa had recorded. “No matter
what please remember that I will never give up or surrender,” she had told them
the previous year. “So let’s agree you’ll continue to assume I’m alive and being
imprisoned against my will.” Yet, in the final months before she lost contact,
she had resisted any further publicity.

Haigh was adamant. “They’ve either killed her or she’s drugged up somewhere and
suffering,” he said. “We need to do something big and dramatic that would get
the world’s attention.” Seven months after losing contact, they sent transcripts
of Latifa’s videos to the U.N., and authorized the BBC to air them.

The footage of Latifa, whispering into the camera as she crouched against the
bathroom wall, was watched around the world. “I’m a hostage. And this villa has
been converted into a jail,” she said. The U.N. called on the U.A.E. to prove
that Latifa was alive. The British government finally broke its silence; Boris
Johnson, the Prime Minister, and Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, expressed
concern about her safety.

The pressure on Sheikh Mohammed intensified in May, 2021, when the High Court
published a further finding: Haya’s phone, and those of her lawyers, security
guards, and an assistant, had been hacked with Pegasus, and Sheikh Mohammed,
“above any other person in the world,” was the likely culprit. Haigh found that
his phone had also been hacked, and Latifa’s number appeared on a leaked list of
apparent Pegasus targets. (Sheikh Mohammed has denied involvement in any hacks,
and the makers of the software dispute the list.) The court ultimately ordered
Sheikh Mohammed to pay Haya more than five hundred and fifty million pounds,
reputedly the largest divorce settlement in British history, and barred him from
seeing their children, finding that he had used his “immense power” to subject
Haya to an “exorbitant degree” of abuse.

That year, news broke that the Queen had cancelled Sheikh Mohammed’s invitation
to join her in the Royal Box at Ascot. Finally, the political mood seemed to be
turning. Haigh and Jauhiainen seized the moment to file an application to the
British government to freeze the Sheikh’s U.K. assets and impose travel
sanctions over his “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” of Latifa.



Then, on May 20th, a British teacher in Dubai named Sioned Taylor posted a
picture on Instagram, with the caption “Lovely evening.” It showed three women
at a table in a deserted mall. Next to Taylor, hunched forward, blank-faced, and
dressed in black, was Latifa.

Haigh’s first impulse was relief. At least, he thought, “she’s alive, and she’s
got a little bit of freedom.” Yet this looked like exactly the sort of staged
photograph Latifa had always resisted. Jauhiainen knew Taylor: she had been one
of a few women approved to spend time with Latifa after her first imprisonment.
Latifa’s face in the picture was inscrutable.

The following day, the Lamorna Cove campaigners received the first of a series
of letters from Niri Shan, a partner at a global law firm named Taylor Wessing,
ordering them to stop advocating for Latifa. Shan said Latifa had informed him
that “she now wants to live a normal, private life to the fullest extent
possible.” She had been distressed by the publication of her videos, Shan said,
and did not want “any further publicity.” Haigh and Jauhiainen were asked to
sign an agreement not to speak publicly about Latifa, and to delete the evidence
she had shared. Haigh refused to comply, unless the firm could prove that Latifa
was not acting under duress. “I know it’s not just her behind these letters,”
Haigh told me. “It’s Daddy.” (Shan declined to comment.)



The next day, Sioned Taylor posted another photograph of Latifa, sitting at a
waterfront restaurant in Dubai, smiling tightly at the camera. “Lovely food at
Bice Mare with Latifa earlier,” she wrote. The following month came a picture of
Taylor and Latifa, who was dressed in baggy sweatpants and a crumpled tie-dyed
shirt, apparently at the Madrid airport. Shortly after, the law firm Taylor
Wessing issued a statement in Latifa’s name. “I recently visited 3 European
countries on holiday with my friend. I asked her to post a few photos online to
prove to campaigners that I can travel where I want,” it said. “I hope now that
I can live my life in peace.”

Around the same time, the campaigners suffered another reversal. They had been
aided by a cousin of Latifa’s, Marcus Essabri, who had broken ties with the
royal family and was living in the English cathedral city of Gloucester, working
as a barber and running a falafel joint. But in August, after signing the
agreement offered by Taylor Wessing, he was invited to meet Latifa in Iceland,
along with Taylor and Shan. “I had an emotional reunion with my cousin,” he
wrote afterward on Twitter. “It was reassuring to see her so happy.”

Jauhiainen was incensed. “So she can just live her quiet life and this never
happened?” she said. “Excuse me. This did happen—and I was kidnapped as well.”
But she and Haigh agreed that it was untenable to continue advocating for
Latifa’s release. “Marcus has met her, we’re getting letters from lawyers saying
stop, and she’s popping up around the world—and yet we’re going to carry on a
campaign saying free her? It just looks ridiculous,” Haigh told me. “It was
clear to me that she had done a deal. She was breaking.” Reluctantly, he and
Jauhiainen announced that their campaign was over.

One morning last October, Haigh met me at Cornwall’s Newquay airport and drove
me down to Lamorna. At his cottage, he led me to his study, where a small,
salt-smeared window overlooked the sea. A bare light bulb shone over shelves of
neatly labelled evidence files from the campaign. Alien, the sphynx cat, wound
herself around our ankles as we talked.

Haigh logged in to his computer and scrolled through the messages he had saved
from Latifa’s secret phone, in files with code names such as “Cinnamon Bun
Recipes” and “Custard Donut.” He and Jauhiainen had dedicated more than three
years to Latifa’s cause, and he felt furious that Dubai was erasing their work.
“They want to reinvent history,” he said. “And they’re doing it.”

The photographs of Latifa seemed to ease any reputational troubles Sheikh
Mohammed might have faced. The head of the U.A.E.’s interior ministry was
appointed president of Interpol. The Biden Administration approved a
multi-billion-dollar arms deal and pushed ahead with a hundred-billion-dollar
clean-energy collaboration, declaring the U.A.E. an “essential partner of the
United States.” World leaders poured into the Dubai Expo last spring, and the
emirate was selected as the host for the COP28 climate-change summit.

Last year, the U.N. revealed an unexpected development: Latifa had met one of
Mary Robinson’s successors, the former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, in
Paris. “Latifa conveyed to the High Commissioner that she was well & expressed
her wish for respect for her privacy,” the U.N. Human Rights account posted on
Twitter. A picture was released of Latifa standing beside Bachelet outside a
Paris Métro station. Haigh felt relieved, he told me; if Bachelet was involved,
then perhaps he could lay Latifa’s case to rest.



But he kept asking himself: if Latifa was truly at liberty, why hadn’t she sent
him or Jauhiainen so much as a single text? She had insisted that if they ever
lost contact “just be sure I’m imprisoned and waiting.” The cognitive dissonance
was exhausting, and Latifa’s absence left “a great hole,” Haigh told me. He
missed her late-night companionship, and the sense of purpose he drew from
fighting on her side. “It’s like someone’s died,” he said. “And I’m literally
sitting at the end of the earth, looking at the sea.”

I met Jauhiainen a month later in a bright café in South London, close to the
house where she was staying with a friend. She, too, had been struggling to
reorient herself since losing contact with Latifa. She couldn’t go back to
Dubai, and Finland was no longer home. “There’s no closure whatsoever,” she told
me. Soon after we met, she bought a one-way ticket to Thailand, intending to
stay footloose until she figured out what to do next.

In April, I wrote to Latifa, urging her to speak with me. I received a letter
from a law firm in London, refusing that request. That same day, a new account
appeared on Instagram in the name of Latifa Al Maktoum. “I was recently made
aware of media inquiries for a piece which casts doubt on my freedom,” the
account posted, alongside a picture of Latifa in Austria, posing outside the
Swarovski Crystal Worlds park in a puffer coat and snow boots. “I can understand
it from the outside perspective of seeing someone so outspoken fall off the grid
and have others speak on her behalf, especially after everything that has
happened which appears to make me look like I’m being controlled. I am totally
free and living an independent life.”

A nurse who served for two years on Shamsa’s team of minders told me that Latifa
is living in her own home and drives herself around Dubai, without wearing the
abaya. “I think she negotiated something and she’s now managing her own life,
within agreeable boundaries,” she said. Those boundaries, she surmised, included
“keeping the family business private.” (The nurse, like many others I spoke
with, said she had “no idea” what had happened to Shamsa.) She considered Latifa
“a brilliant woman,” but suggested that she had brought her troubles upon
herself. “In any family, if you break the rules of your culture, it’s not going
to be a great experience,” she said.

Yet for years Latifa had refused to contemplate that her campaign could end this
way. “There will never be a conclusion where ‘Latifa is happily with her UAE
family’ NEVER,” she wrote soon after making contact with Haigh and Jauhiainen
from her villa. “I want to live, exist and die as a fully emancipated person. My
soul will be happy with that. I need that. It’s my destiny and the only
conclusion I’ll accept.” ♦



Published in the print edition of the May 8, 2023, issue, with the headline “The
Fugitive Princesses.”


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