KIDNAPPED PRINCESSES Snatched off a Cambridge street, drugged and flown to Dubai – one of TWO daughters sheikh abducted
PRINCESS Shamsa was snatched from the streets of Cambridge 20 years ago. She has not been seen in public since.
Now High Court judge Sir Andrew McFarlane has sensationally concluded that her autocratic father Sheikh al-Maktoum is keeping her captive.
It means Dubai will come under international pressure to free her and her sister Princess Latifa from their ‘torture’ chambers in their father’s palaces.
Before going on the run herself and being captured in 2018, Latifa recorded a chilling video claiming her elder sister Shamsa was kept on medication to ‘control her mind’ that had ‘made her like a zombie’.
She said Shamsa ‘had been kept in the dark continuously for months, perhaps years. She could not open her eyes properly for a long time because she had not seen daylight for so long’. Kept prisoner in a Dubai palace, Shamsa had ‘tried to kill herself many times’.
Until now, the extraordinary story of the ‘zombie princess’ Shamsa and her kidnap could only be pieced together from second-hand reports.
In mid- July 2000 the ‘headher strong’ then 19-year-old princess – reportedly angry her father wouldn’t let her go to university and disgusted by Dubai’s human rights record – evaded high- security at her father’s sprawling Longcross estate in Surrey, where the family spent most summers.
She drove her black Range Rover to the corner of the grounds and escaped through a perimeter fence on to Chobham Common, then ran off.
Staff discovered her abandoned car the next day, sparking chaos. As a search operation swung into action, the sheikh flew in from his horse racing base in Newmarket, Suffolk, to take charge.
All staff were sent out, on horseback or in cars, to search for the runaway. Nothing was found except Shamsa’s discarded mobile on the common.
For a few weeks, his teenage daughter evaded capture by staying at a hostel in south London. But on August 19, her father’s henchmen caught up with her outside a bar in Cambridge. The sheikh had traced after ordering the bugging of Shamsa’s friends’ phones, the High Court judgment found. He had even offered a Rolex watch bribe to one.
Shamsa later wrote in a letter she apparently managed to smuggle out of captivity that ‘I was caught by my father’. She wrote: ‘He managed to track me down through someone I kept in touch with. He sent four Arab men to catch me.
‘They were carrying guns and threatening me. They drove me to my father’s place in Newmarket – there they gave me two injections and a handful of tablets. The very next morning a helicopter came and flew me to the plane, which took me back to Dubai. I am locked up.
‘I haven’t seen anyone – not even the man you call my father. I told you this would happen.’
She was flown to Deauville in France by helicopter and then to Dubai by private plane, probably the sheikh’s Boeing 737 business jet or his smaller Gulfstream G-IV, both of which were in Europe that August.
According to a friend of Shamsa, Longcross staff were made to sign confidentiality agreements forbidding them talking about her disappearance. Nothing was made public. Then in March 2001, Cambridgeshire police received a phone call from a British solicitor with a bizarre tale to tell.
He said he was acting for Princess Shamsa and gave details of the alleged kidnapping and how she was smuggled out of the UK.
The allegation was passed to David Beck, then detective chief inspector of Cambridge CID. ‘ Kidnap is a major offence,’ he said. ‘It’s not every day that an allegation involving a head of state lands on a police officer’s desk.’
Sir Andrew’s ruling said Mr Beck – who gave evidence – had interviewed Shamsa’s friends and many of the sheikh’s staff, who corroborated several aspects of the story.
At least one of those closely involved in the abduction, identified as Mohammed Al Shaibani, remains one of the sheikh’s assistants to this day.
The sheikh tried to fob off police by saying his daughter
‘They gave me two injections’ ‘I told you this would happen’
‘felt constricted by the security arrangements that were necessarily in place around her’.
He told detectives she had gone ‘ missing’ and they feared she had been kidnapped, adding: ‘ She was more vulnerable than other young women of her age because her status made her a kidnap risk. Her mother and I were extremely worried about her safety and wellbeing.
‘I emphasise that her mother and I jointly decided to organise a search for her. When she was found, I remember our feeling of overwhelming relief that she was safe and had not come to any harm.’
Sir Andrew said this statement had actually helped corroborate the allegations, especially as he confirmed the search for her.
He concluded it was true ‘the father ordered the unlawful abduction of his daughter, Sheikha Shamsa, from the United Kingdom to Dubai’.
Yesterday Cambridgeshire Constabulary said: ‘An investigation into the alleged abduction of Shamsa Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum in 2000 was carried out in 2001. With the evidence that was available to us this was insufficient to take any further action.
‘A review took place in 2017 and it was again concluded there was insufficient evidence to take any further action. This is no longer an active investigation and we are not in contact with the victim.’