Mail’s court battle to reveal truth

THE Daily Mail led the way in the legal fight to ensure details of the explosive custody battle between Sheikh Mohammed Al Maktoum and his sixth wife Princess Haya made it into the public domain.

The Mail was joined in its quest by eight other media organisations in securing court agreement that disclosing aspects of the case were in the public interest.

The Family Division of the High Court found Sheikh Mohammed ‘ordered and orchestrated’ the abduction of two of his adult daughters. One, Princess Shamsa, has not been seen publicly since she was snatched from a British street more than 20 years ago.

Her sister Princess Latifa said Shamsa, now 40, was kept captive in Dubai and was drugged to ‘control her mind’, and that the medication ‘made her like a zombie’. Latifa, 35, tried to escape Dubai onboard a yacht, only to be captured at sea by commandos and returned to the desert principality.

She claimed she had been beaten and kept captive inside a fortified villa in Dubai, where police had threatened she would ‘never see the sun again’.

In his latest ruling, made public yesterday, the judge – Sir Andrew McFarlane – said Latifa’s fate showed her father ‘is prepared and able to use the Government security services for his own family needs’.

Princess Haya told the High Court she had fled Dubai because she feared for her own life and the safety of her two children.

The 47-year-old said she had been sidelined within the royal court in Dubai. It later emerged she’d had a two-year relationship with her British bodyguard. Anonymous threats were left in her bedroom and living quarters, including one saying: ‘We will take your son – your daughter is ours – your life is over.’ A gun was left on her bed.

The sheikh allegedly told their son that Haya was ‘no longer needed’, according to legal documents. She fled to Britain in April 2019 with her two children, and learned Sheikh Mohammed had divorced her under Sharia law, postdating it to the 20th anniversary of her father’s death.

She asked the High Court to make her children wards of court so that they could not be taken to Dubai. Her former husband demanded their immediate return.

Haya, educated at Badminton School in Bristol and Bryanston in Dorset before studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, also asked the court to protect her and her children.