Saudi Arabia’s former King Abdullah with his four daughters by Alanoud al Fayez (Pictured in 2014 by Channel 4 News)
In 2014, some media reported the story of the four princesses who have not been heard from since the death of King Abdullah
In March 2014, some international media reported that the King of Saudi Arabia had held four of his daughters captive in a palace in Jeddah for about fifteen years. The then king was Abdullah, brother of the current ruler Salman: he died in January 2015 at the age of 90, and since then nothing has been heard of the imprisoned daughters or their mother, who is divorced from Abdullah and lives in London. A recent article in the New Yorker talked about it again: The author, Heidi Blake, spoke to two journalists and a scholar who managed to communicate by email and phone with the daughters of King Abdullah and their mother about a decade ago, but with no one could give her new information about her fate.
The four captive princesses are named Sahar, Maha, Hala and Jawaher and were born between 1971 and 1976 – so today they are between 52 and 47 years old. Her mother, Alanoud al Fayez, was married at the age of 15 to the then Saudi Prince Abdullah. Like other Saudi nobles, Adbullah was polygamous and fathered at least 35 children during his lifetime. The relationship between him and al-Fayez deteriorated, as far as is known, because they had no sons, and at some point the woman fled to London and divorced her husband.
There is no accurate information about the lives of King Abdullah and al-Fayez’s daughters, but according to Blake’s reconstruction, the four women had a privileged and rather free childhood and were able to travel and study throughout Europe. For some reason, however, they were imprisoned in a royal family palace just before the start of the reign of their father, who became king in 2005.
In Saudi Arabia, women do not have the same freedoms as men and cannot travel abroad, marry, attend secondary school or determine themselves without the permission of their male guardian, who can be her husband, father, brother or the other undergoing medical procedures son.
Between 2013 and 2014, Sahar and Jawaher, the eldest and youngest of the four sisters, contacted some people abroad via the internet. Sahar used Twitter to write a few messages to Ali al Ahmed, a dissident and Saudi political expert living in Washington, USA. According to al Ahmed’s report, Sahar said that she was locked in a palace with Jawaher and that she and her sister had a phone that had been made available for them to speak to their mother; However, they had no contact with the other two sisters, Maha and Hala, who were detained elsewhere.
Al Ahmed contacted Alanoud al Fayez and advised her to report her daughters’ situation to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Then the woman was interviewed by Fatima Manji, a journalist from the British TV show Channel 4 News: The interview, in which al Fayez’s face is kept hidden because the woman did not want to be recognized, can still be viewed on YouTube. On that occasion, the Saudi embassy in London merely stated that the princesses’ situation was “a private matter”.
Two and a half weeks later, Manji also interviewed Sahar and Jawaher via video call: it aired on Channel 4 on the same day that then-US President Barack Obama met with King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia. “We are hostages,” Sahar said in an interview, “our father, the king, is responsible.” This interview can also be viewed on YouTube.
According to al Fayez’s complaint and the stories of Sahar and Jawaher, the four sisters were constantly monitored by armed guards, “systematically drugged” to prevent them from escaping, and had no access to medical care, a problem for Hala in particular represented who suffered from anorexia. Although they lived in a building, their living conditions were not good as it was a dilapidated building with intermittent lack of clean water and electricity, according to some of the sisters’ videos broadcast on Channel 4.
In the interview, the sisters said they decided to speak to reporters about their situation after their father told them he would never set them free and that their brothers would keep them captive after his death.
As for the reasons for their imprisonment, they stated that the king wanted al-Fayez to return to Arabia and that he was essentially holding his daughters captive so that she would do so. Jawaher also once said they were being punished for speaking to the king about human rights abuses in Saudi Arabia, which Sahar called “gender apartheid”; In an email sent to a Middle Eastern news site a few months later, Sahar said the sisters were slowly being deprived of their freedom after they began to question aspects of the Saudi regime.
Instead, during a second interview with Manji, al Fayez said he saw something in Saudi Arabia that the king didn’t want to reveal: he didn’t say what it was because he hoped to convince the ex-husband to release his daughters showed him that he would not talk about it.
According to interviews broadcast on British television, Sahar and Jawaher said their captors stopped bringing them food. However, they were not deprived of their telephone and internet access and continued to communicate with some foreign journalists.
In May 2014, two officials of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights wrote to the government of Saudi Arabia asking for an account of the four princesses and in particular the two who appeared not to have been fed: The United Nations urged Saudi Arabia to Not committing further violations of women’s rights or proving that the allegations leveled against the king were false received no response.
When he heard of King Abdullah Ali al Ahmed’s death, he wrote to his sisters to update them on their condition, but never received a reply. Not even Manji and Ángeles Espinosa, a journalist from the Spanish newspaper El País who had communicated with the princesses, have been able to get in touch with them again. And he couldn’t be found at Fayez either: his Twitter profile had been deleted. Heidi Blake has tried unsuccessfully to find it. Not even the United Nations heard anything.
The most optimistic hypothesis of the people who spoke to the princesses is that after the death of their father, the sisters gained their freedom in exchange for silence between them and their mother. However, Al Ahmed is skeptical because he believes that if this were the case, Sahar would have warned him that everything was fine: according to him, the princesses could be dead.
– Also read: The latest news about Latifa bint Mohammed al Maktoum, daughter of the Emir of Dubai who has been held captive by her father since 2018
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