Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, 37, is the daughter of the Ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. In 2018 she had a video released in which she tells of her father’s imprisonment against her will and a daring failed escape attempt (we wrote about it in retrospect). “If you watch this video, it’s not good. Either I’m dead or I’m in a very, very, very bad situation,” she said in the first few seconds of the recording. Now the New Yorker returns to his with a lengthy investigation by Heidi Blake into the persecuted women of Dubai’s royal family It’s an extraordinary Pulitzer-winning investigation that only newspapers like the New Yorker can produce: not just because it’s 18 pages long, but because it has the courage to confront the world’s mighty with force and authority of free journalism. It reconstructs, with accuracy and a wealth of fact, a story so horrible as to be unbelievable. Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s lawyers and legal representatives have disputed this in every way possible, but it is largely being upheld by the High Court in London and corroborated by an impressive body of fact and testimony, it sheds a disturbing light on Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Emir who rules Dubai with an absolute monarchy and who is pretending to the West to be a defender of women’s rights while In reality – Blake writes – he suppresses the most elementary rights in his family, if necessary even with torture.
The escape attempt
The story of Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum’s escape in 2018 is well known: she tried to leave Dubai on board a boat with the help of a Finnish friend, Tiina Jauhiainen (her Capoeira teacher) and a French fixer, Hervé Jaubert. Their plan was for Latifa to cross the Oman border, hidden in the tire compartment of a car driven by Jauhiainen, and from there reach the yacht where Jaubert (who had half a million dollars) was waiting for them to head for India and from there into the west, where the princess wanted to ask for political asylum. The three did indeed cross the Persian Gulf but were intercepted by Indian security forces off the coast of the country at the request of Father Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who still defines his escape as an attempted kidnapping. Latifa was later handed over to Dubai authorities.
Video
Before she was arrested, she had recorded a video explaining the reasons for her flight and the reasons why she could not live freely in her country, accusing her family of abuse and human rights abuses and hiring a lawyer to do it to spread across the world in case she was caught. Very little was known about Latifa after that: her family always claimed she voluntarily returned home, where she was treated for an unspecified mental health problem, as confirmed in 2019 by Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and former President of Ireland, who met her briefly along with her father’s youngest wife, Princess Haya. In 2021, Princess Latifa made a public appearance again, asking through her family’s lawyers to “be able to live in peace”. But she never met or contacted her friends again, including the Finnish instructor who had accompanied her in her attempt to escape and an activist with the Bar Association Detained in Dubai, David Haigh, whom she had told, if not heard, more than that, she must thought she was a prisoner against her will again.
The most important facts
Blake now recounts in detail what happened to her before and after this attempted escape, facts that Latifa herself partially recounted in the video of the escape and in other videos later sent to Jauhiainen and Haigh. Blake also reconstructs the story of one of Latifa’s sisters, Shamsa, her aunt Bouchra, and her father’s younger wife, Haya. Together they create a frightening picture. Here are the key facts. The year 2018 was Princess Latifa’s second escape attempt. The first dates back to when she was 16 and, without ever having gone out alone before, was trying to reach the Oman border in secret. At the time, Latifa jumped over the fence of her home, took a taxi to the border area, and persuaded a passing cyclist to sell her his bike. She cycled to the border, cut the fence with bolt cutters she had brought from home, and arrived in Oman. There she was found by a team of soldiers who searched for her and captured her. “Latifa was taken to a police station where she was met by a man who looked like ‘a toad’ and was working for her father. He took her home, where she recalled being beaten until her nose bled.” His mother was present, “dressed with a face covered in makeup and icy purple lipstick as if she were on waiting for my father to visit.”
violence and prison
After the beating, Latifa was “transferred to a prison in the desert
. Inside, she was taken to a cell and asked to remove her shoes – Blake continues –. Then one guard held her down while another hit the soles of her feet with a heavy wooden stick. “He couldn’t have hit me harder,” she wrote in a detailed account of her captivity. The subsequent torture session lasted five hours and rendered her unable to walk; had to drag herself across the floor to drink from a faucet near the bathroom. He then stuffed his broken feet into his Skechers, hoping they would serve as a cast, and slept in them. She was woken up by guards who dragged her out of bed for more beatings. (Sheikh’s attorneys deny he abused or imprisoned Latifa). Latifa remained in captivity for thirteen months. He slept on a thin, blood-stained mattress, in the same clothes he’d worn after his escape. He had no soap or toothbrush. Sometimes the lights were off for days, so he had to move about his cell in the dark. “I was treated worse than any animal,” she wrote. One day in July 2003, she was taken from her cell and put into a waiting vehicle. “I hadn’t moved in a year and a month so it felt like a roller coaster ride in the car,” she wrote. She was taken home, where she recalled her mother welcoming her as if nothing had happened. But when Latifa looked in the mirror, she was horrified at the sight of her sunken eyes and protruding hipbones.” At the time, Latifa rebelled again and begged for her sister Shamsa, for which she says she was sedated and imprisoned for another two years held.
Sister Shamsa’s escape attempt
She asked about her sister Shamsa because Shamsa, 4 years her senior, had also tried to escape from Latifa: in 2000 when she was 19 years old. While spending the summer in England to enjoy horseback riding, Shamsa ran away from a country estate near Cheltenham, England. She took a taxi to London, where she approached a Yellow Pages lawyer, Paul Simon, to seek political asylum. The lawyer replied that he could not help her without a passport. Shortly thereafter, Shamsa was found by her father’s private security agents and brought back to Dubai. Since then she has not been seen in public.
The reconstruction of the facts
Blake has pieced together what happened to her. “On September 1, a Surrey woman named Jane-Marie Allen returned home from holiday to find a strange message on her answering machine, left by someone using a name similar to ‘Shansa’. The caller said she was “brought back to Dubai against her will” and asked that her lawyer, Paul Simon, be notified. Allen didn’t know the woman, probably had the wrong number, but was clearly in trouble. Allen called the police,” writes Blake in the New Yorker. “Six months after the kidnapping, Simon received an email with a message from Shamsa. “They’re watching me all the time, so I’ll get straight to the point. I was captured,” 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 captive in the palace grounds in Dubai, where she said her father’s guards were trying to ” to terrorize me into breaking down”. But he had found a way to get messages across, getting a clerk to tuck notes in her hair and handing them to Latifa and other well-wishers. In one such case, Shamsa ordered Simon to involve British authorities “immediately”.
The rubber wall against the investigation
Simon filed a complaint and Chief Inspector David Beck, who was investigating the case, said he found clear evidence that Shamsa had been kidnapped, but his investigation was through the rubber wall of Dubai authorities and Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s lawyers have always denied (and still deny) that it was a kidnapping. He and other investigators are convinced that there was also a “political intervention” by the British authorities that blocked further investigations. “In the years that followed, relations between Great Britain and Dubai have become even closer. Sheikh Mohammed has invested hundreds of millions of pounds in British horse racing. At Ascot he often stood next to Queen Elizabeth, joined her in the Royal Box and even traveled to the event in her carriage at the head of the royal procession,” writes Blake. Latifa said she only saw her sister again in 2008, three years after Latifa herself returned home after her first attempt to escape from captivity. By then, Shamsa was “just a shell of what she was, tortured with all her willpower”. Shamsa had attempted suicide three times: by slitting her wrists, overdosing and attempting to set her cell on fire. She had been released after going on a hunger strike. Now she was on tranquilizers and antidepressants that left her “like a zombie.” At first, Latifa writes, Shamsa was uncomfortable opening her eyes because she was groping in the dark for so long. It had to be held by the hand.”
The kidnapping of Princess Bouchra
According to Blake reconstructions, in 2000, the same year of Shamsa’s escape attempt, another woman of the Dubai royal family was abducted from London: Princess Bouchra bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, one of the wives of the then Ruler of Dubai, Emir Maktoum, elder brother of Latifa Mohammed’s father. Bouchra had moved to London with her three children in search of more independence and a career as a painter. “I want the women of my country to have the courage to show what they can do,” she said in an interview with the weekly Hello! According to Blake, she was also escorted by agents working for the Dubai royal family and forcibly taken to Farnborough Airport along with her three children. At that time, the babysitters called the police and reported the kidnapping of the children. “Scotland Yard tracked them down on the runway and the plane was detained – writes Blake -. Patrick Nixon, the British ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, told me he received a call from an Emirati diplomat asking him to “contact the police and tell them to leave.” Nixon refused and suggested that the diplomat contact the State Department. Shortly thereafter, the plane was cleared for departure. According to a former official, State Department officials viewed such an incident as “another family dispute.” Scotland Yard also later called the matter “a major domestic problem” and “a misunderstanding between relatives”. «Later, however, Nixon learned from Emirati sources that Bouchra had been “locked up in a mansion in Dubai” – adds Blake -. A person connected to the royal family confirmed it to me: “They kept her captive in her house and constantly drugged her with sedatives to say that she was crazy”».
The rumor about Bouchra’s death
His fate was dire according to the information gathered by Blake. “In 2007, a year after the death of her husband and the inauguration of Sheikh Mohammed, rumors circulated in the palace that Bouchra was dead. He was 34 years old. Some said she slipped away in her sleep. But in the video that Latifa recorded before she fled, she accuses her father. “His behavior was too outrageous,” she said. “He felt threatened by her and killed her.” He repeated the claim in several letters to friends. In one of them, he claims that Bouchra was beaten to death by her father’s guards. Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyers deny this fact, but Latifa’s story has been confirmed by two sources close to the royal family.
Forced back to Dubai
These are the precedents. Also in 2018, Princess Latifa was forcibly returned to Dubai after her second escape attempt. “I want you to be ashamed that it took a Navy, several warships, an armed commando, three tranquilizers and an hour-long battle to put a petite, unarmed woman on a jet,” Latifa later wrote to friends. “Latifa was taken to a desert prison called Al Awir and put in a cell with blacked-out windows. At first, her captors were insensitive, but once her video statement was released, they began asking her to retract it. For a time they served their food on golden plates. “You are extremely ridiculous,” she wrote. As news of her capture spread, Latifa came under increasing pressure to address concerns about her safety,” Blake wrote in the New Yorker. After months, in the spring of 2019, the Princess was able to contact Jauhiainen and the activist David Haigh, who was being held in Dubai and who was pursuing her case, through an intermediary. In April, the two secretly gave her a phone, which the girl used to keep in touch with them, sent videos and texts detailing her story, and denounced being held against her will again, despite assurances from the family to the contrary.
The Escape of Princess Haya
Around the same time, another unexpected twist happened: in April 2019, Princess Haya, Latifa’s father’s youngest wife, fled to London after her husband discovered she was having an affair with one of his guards at the corpse. And he asked for international protection for himself and his children. “In court, he cited the abuses that Shamsa and Latifa were subjected to as evidence of the Sheikh’s threat,” Blake explains.
The global women’s forum
Meanwhile, Dubai hosted the Global Women’s Forum in February 2020. And the Emir Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum opened it by promising that his nation will be “a world leader” in the “growth and advancement of women.” “Three thousand attendees from over eighty countries gathered to hear speakers including Ivanka Trump, who praised Sheikh Mohammed’s “determined commitment” to empowering women, and former British Prime Minister Theresa May, who accepted a fee of £115,000 to speak about Gender talk equality,” writes Blake. In March 2020, the High Court of London granted Haya and her children’s requested protection, ruling that the Emir, her husband, used the “very considerable powers at his disposal to achieve his particular ends”. i.e. to control daughters, imprison them and carry out “a campaign of fear and intimidation” against Haya. Then, in May 2021, the High Court in London issued its final decision, ordering the Emir Mohammed to pay Haya more than £150million and forbidding him from seeing her children for using his “immense power”. had to subject Haya to “an exorbitant degree” of “abuse. Trial documents also revealed that Haya’s phone and that of his lawyers, security guards and an assistant had been hacked using Pegasus software, which allows you to control phones remotely, and that Emir Mohammed “more than any other person in the world” was the likely one wrongdoer. Activist Haigh discovered that her phone was also tapped using the same spy software and that Latifa’s number appeared in a leaked online list of Pegasus targets (facts disputed by Emir Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum through his lawyers).
Latifa’s meeting with Bachelet
Meanwhile, Princess Latifa has stopped replying to friends Jauhiainen and Haigh since late July 2020. And since 2021, she has reappeared in public accompanied by a British teacher, one of the women “approved” by the family to keep her company after her first escape. The following year he met in Paris with former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who became UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “Michelle Bachelet met Princess Latifa of Dubai in Paris at her request. After meeting Latifa’s legal counsel, the High Commissioner and Latifa met privately. Latifa has informed the High Commissioner that she is fine and has expressed the wish that her privacy be respected.” he wrote on Twitter the United Nations Human Rights Account. Jauhiainen and Haigh have since been banned from promoting Latifa by an Anglo-Saxon law firm. When New York reporter Heidi Blake asked to interview her last month, a London law firm turned her down.
The shared post
On the same day, April 26, a new Instagram account appeared in the name of Princess Latifa. It includes a single post: “I want to share my sincere gratitude with everyone who has shown compassion to me over the past few years. During this time my life has changed in many ways and I look forward to the next chapter. I was recently alerted to media requests for an article questioning my freedom for not speaking publicly about what happened. I’ve made statements through my attorneys and posted personal travel photos with friends and family because I thought that would do. I can understand that from an outsider’s perspective – when such an open person stops communicating and lets others speak for them, especially after what has happened – it might seem that they are being controlled. I am completely free and live an independent life. I live in Dubai most of the year and can also travel as I please. I want to say thank you again to everyone who has supported and supported me, I am very grateful,” the post reads.
The Nurse’s Testimony
Blake was also able to contact a nurse who was part of Shamsa’s group for two years. He told her that Princess Latifa lives in her own house and drives around Dubai alone: ”I think she’s negotiated something and is now managing her life within acceptable limits,” in exchange for a commitment to maintaining the “privacy of the family business.” . . However, the nurse has no idea what happened to Princess Shamsa. The process opened by Princess Haya’s appeal prompted the West to treat the Emir of Dubai with caution for a while. Now everything seems to have returned. The head of the Interior Ministry of the United Arab Emirates – the New Yorker recalls – was appointed President of Interpol, Dubai hosted the Expo until March 2022 and will host the Cop28 climate conference. And the Biden administration has singled out the United Arab Emirates as a “key partner of the United States” with arms deals and political energy.
This article was first published in Press Review, one of the newsletters that Corriere reserves for its subscribers. To receive it you must subscribe to Il Punto, of which the press review is one of the appointments: you can do it here.
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
