A daughter of Dubai’s highly effective ruler who tried to flee the nation in 2018 solely to be detained by commandos in a ship off India has re-emerged in new movies revealed Tuesday, saying she doesn’t know if she’s “going to survive this situation.”
The movies launched by the BBC present Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum at a “jail villa,” apparently situated within the skyscraper-studded city-state within the United Arab Emirates. Her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, additionally serves because the prime minister and vp within the hereditarily dominated UAE.
“I’m a hostage,” the sheikha says in a single video. “This villa has been transformed into jail.
“I can’t even go outside to get any fresh air,” she additionally mentioned.
The authorities’s Dubai Media Office didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from The Associated Press.
In 2018, the AP reported how a good friend and an ex-French spy helped Sheikha Latifa escape by boat, solely to be captured off India.
The BBC mentioned Sheikha Latifa recorded the movies in a rest room on the villa over months on a cellphone she secretly acquired a few 12 months after her seize.
“I don’t know when I’ll be released and what the conditions will be like when I’m released,” she says in a video. “Every day I am worried about my safety and my life.”
The movies, a part of an episode of BBC’s “Panorama” investigative collection being broadcast Tuesday, additionally embody an interview with Mary Robinson, a former president of Ireland and U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. Robinson appeared in images with Latifa revealed by Emirati officers after the sheikha’s return to Dubai in 2018.
Robinson instructed the BBC that she had been misled by Emirati authorities who instructed her Latifa was a troubled younger lady protected within the care of her household.
“I was particularly tricked when the photographs went public,” Robinson instructed the BBC. “That was a total surprise…. I was absolutely stunned.”
The dramatic would-be sea escape and its aftermath intruded into the fastidiously managed picture maintained by the household of Sheikh Mohammed, who’s believed to have a number of dozen kids from a number of wives. Some of his little kids determine prominently in native media and on-line, however others are hardly ever seen. Sheikha Latifa was extensively identified for her love of skydiving previous to 2018.
Sheikh Mohammed’s household life once more grew to become a public matter in 2020. Then, a British decide dominated the sheikh had performed a marketing campaign of worry and intimidation in opposition to his estranged spouse and ordered the kidnapping of two of his daughters, certainly one of them Sheikha Latifa. The ruling got here in a custody battle between Sheikh Mohammed and estranged spouse Princess Haya, daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan.
Sheikh Mohammed is the founding father of the profitable Godolphin horse-racing secure and on pleasant phrases with Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II. In 2019, he acquired a trophy from the queen after certainly one of his horses received a race at Royal Ascot.
