Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum – the daughter of UAE Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – was last seen in public in March 2018 aboard a yacht off the coast of India, before a raid by Indian and Emirate forces she is returning to Dubai, according to two people who helped her plan her escape.
It was her second failed attempt to flee abroad after previously trying to leave the UAE in 2002 as a teenager.
In a video, obtained by BBC Panorama and provided by CNN before the broadcast of the documentary “The Missing Princess” broadcast on Tuesday night, Princess Latifa says: “I am a hostage. This villa has been converted into a prison. All the windows are closed, I can’t open any windows … I was alone, isolated. No access to medical care, no trial, no fees, nothing. ”
CNN has not independently verified Latifa’s videos or current location. CNN contacted the Dubai government for comments.
Princess Latifa secretly recorded the videos on a mobile phone while hiding in a closed bathroom, according to the BBC. The documentary says that about a year after Latifa was taken back to Dubai, her friend Tiina Jauhiainen was contacted by someone who helped her secretly reconnect with her.
Jauhiainen managed to receive a phone call to Latifa and since then the princess has recorded many video messages “describing her captivity in a villa transformed into a prison with closed windows”, according to a BBC press release.
“BBC Panorama independently checked the details of the place where Latifa was being held hostage. She was guarded by about 30 police officers, who worked in rotation, both inside and outside the villa. The location is just a few meters from “It is unknown at this time what he will do after leaving the post.”
In another video that will be shown in the documentary Latifa says: “I have been here since then, for more than a year in isolation. No access to medical care, no trial, no taxes, nothing … Every day I am worried about my safety and the police threaten me I’ll never see the sun again. I’m not safe here. ”
Jauhiainen tells the documentary that she is very worried about her girlfriend: “She is so pale that she has not seen the sunlight for months. She can practically only move from her room to the kitchen and back.”
Robinson visited at the request of the ruling family, according to a statement sent by the UAE mission in Geneva to the Office of Special Procedures of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “The documents answer and challenge the false accusations that were made about Her Highness, providing evidence that she lives and lives with her family in Dubai,” the statement said.
However, in the BBC Panorama episode, Robinson gives a different account of his controversial meeting with Latifa in 2018.
“I was initially misled by my good friend, Princess Haya, because she was misled. Haya began to explain that Latifa had a rather serious bipolar problem. And they told me, in a way that was very convincing, “we don’t. I don’t want Latifa to go through other traumas.” … I didn’t know how to address someone who was bipolar about their trauma. I wanted to talk to her and increase the trauma at a nice lunch, ”Robinson says in a clip from the program.
Princess Haya fled Dubai to London with her two children in 2019. The princess, who was the sheikh’s sixth wife and is not Latifa’s mother, later brought a case to the London High Court to seek guardianship for her two children, aged nine and 13, fearing that they too would be abducted.
Last year, a judge in the family division of the High Court in London found that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum was waging a “campaign of fear and intimidation” against Princess Haya.
The court ruled that the sheikh had abducted two of his daughters three times – including one in the historic city of Cambridge in Britain and Princess Latifa in international waters off the coast of India.
Andrew McFarlane, Britain’s oldest family judge, ruled that Sheika Shamsa, one of another wife’s sheikh’s daughters, ran away from her family in the summer of 2000 while visiting Britain. She was later abducted and forced into a car in Cambridge by men working for her father before being taken to the sheik’s property. There, she was airlifted to Deauville, France, and then flown back to Dubai.
The other daughter, Latifa, had twice tried to escape her Emirati family, but was forced to return, once in 2002 from Dubai’s border with Oman, and in 2018 “by an armed attack on the sea” in international waters off the coast of India. , the judge found.
“As far as both Shamsa and Latifa are concerned, it is stated that, after their return to custody of their father’s family, they were deprived of their liberty,” the ruling said, stating that the statement was true.
CNN reported at the time that Sheikh Mohammed – the vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates – said the court’s assessment was a one-sided account.
“This case concerns very personal and private matters related to our children. The appeal was made to protect the best interests and well-being of children. The result does not protect my children from media attention in the way other children in UK family proceedings are protected, “he said in a statement issued by his representatives.
“As head of government, I could not participate in the court’s finding process. This led to the publication of a “finding of facts” decision that inevitably tells only part of the story. I ask the media to respect the privacy of our children and not to intrude on their lives in the UK. ”