Fears of kidnap ‘justified’ after girls snatched
PRINCESS Haya is ‘fully’ justified in fearing her children will be snatched from their English country home by their father’s henchmen using a helicopter, a judge said.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, poses a ‘very significant threat’ to his ex-wife and Al Jalila, 13, and Zayed, nine.
And he could abduct them as he did their half-sisters Princess Shamsa and Princess Latifa.
Shamsa was kidnapped at gunpoint in Cambridgeshire in August 2000 after she ran away from the family’s Longcross estate in Surrey.
She was sedated and whisked out of the UK by helicopter.
Incredibly, a kidnap investigation by Cambridgeshire Police was allegedly shut down by Foreign Office ministers as a favour to the oil-rich nation.
Then, when Shamsa’s sister Latifa tried to flee Dubai in 2018, her ‘coercive and controlling father’ sent commandos to abduct her from her getaway yacht, the court has found. She was taken back to Dubai.
Now a judge ruled that Haya has good reason to fear both for her own life and that her exhusband’s bid to acquire the neighbouring estate to her Castlewood mansion in Berkshire was ‘part of a plan aimed ultimately at the abduction of the children and causing harm to me’. Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the High Court’s family division, claimed that Sheikh Mohammed had waged a campaign of fear and intimidation against his ex-wife.
He added: ‘In circumstances when it takes but a moment to snatch a child from a garden or a country lane... the need to prevent the father, or those acting on his behalf, from coming close to the mother’s property is, in my view, fully made out.’
He also said Haya firmly believed that, ‘were he to spot an opportunity to do so, the father would not hesitate to attempt to abduct the two children in order to repatriate them to Dubai. She also believes that her own life and wellbeing are at extreme risk because her actions have greatly angered the father.’
The judge added: ‘When Sheikha Shamsa was abducted from Cambridge in August 2000, she was driven to one of his properties in Newmarket before being taken by helicopter to France, where she was put on a private plane and flown to Dubai.’ Against that background, he said Haya was therefore ‘justified’ in regarding Sheikh Mohammed’s attempt to buy the property next door as ‘a very significant threat to her security, both in terms of providing an opportunity for 24-hour close surveillance and as a close to hand transport hub for a helicopter’.
One of Haya’s QCs, Tim Otty, told the judge: ‘The children are exposed to grave risk.
‘By grave risk, I mean that fate suffered by Sheikha Shamsa and Sheikha Latifa.’
Charles Geekie QC added that the judge hardly needed
‘Coercive and controlling’ ‘Abduction of the children’
reminding that hacking Latifa’s phone had led to her being tracked down and abducted as she tried to flee for a new life in the West.
The court has also heard that Sheikh Mohammed’s right-hand man, Mohammed Ibrahim Al Shaibani – who was ‘at the heart’ of the Shamsa kidnapping – is still his key aide and was involved in the attempted purchase of Parkwood.