LATIFA’S ESCAPE
JOURNALIST TOM STEINFORT SHARES THE INCREDIBLE TRUE STORY OF THE PRINCESS IMPRISONED BY HER FAMILY
The Instagram photo from mid-June of two women posing at an airport may have been captioned with a simple message – “Great European holiday with Latifa. We’re having fun exploring!” – but the story behind it was far more complex.
Princess Latifa, the 32-year-old daughter of Dubai’s wealthy and powerful Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, had tried to escape from her father twice, the last effort resulting in a dramatic sea capture in 2018. Since then, she has only been heard through harrowing tell-all videos released from behind her prison villa walls in 2019.
Once a vivacious princess who posted happy snaps of sky dives and racehorses, Latifa has been absent from social media for years – images such as the airport scene only started surfacing on other accounts in May after the United Nations demanded evidence from the United Arab Emirates that she was alive.
“I think most people agree the photos are genuine,” says award-winning 60 Minutes journalist Tom Steinfort, who has been covering Latifa’s pursuit of freedom. “What everyone does question is, what are the circumstances in how she came to be there? Why isn’t she allowed to speak? Why does she not have a voice?”
Steinfort explores Latifa’s case and other scandals in his first book, The Sins of the Sheikh: Abduction, Intimidation and Intrigue Inside the Royal Family of Dubai. “Sheikh Mohammad has taken Dubai from a backwater to a global powerhouse,” Steinfort says. “And I think all of his hard work could well be undone by the airing of this dirty laundry and what’s really been going on inside his royal palace. He has reformed Dubai’s economy over the years and made it fantastic. Why not start to reform their human rights? Why not start to reform the way that he runs his own family?”
Here, in an extract, Steinfort chronicles efforts by human rights advocate Tiina Jauhiainen and Detained International attorney David Haigh trying to stay in touch with Latifa …
It was early 2019 when Tiina Jauhiainen received a message from a phone number she didn’t recognise, purporting to be Latifa. Given her vocal advocacy work campaigning for Latifa’s freedom and
calling out Dubai’s lies, Tiina had become something of a target for UAE operatives who tried to mess with her mind. That often involved approaches from “anonymous” accounts online – people trying to lure Tiina into falling for stories that could then be exploited to damage her credibility. This latest random contact seemed to fit the bill, but there was something about this particular message that made Tiina sit up and pay attention.
She got in touch with David Haigh whose reaction to her was blunt: “I remember at the time, paranoid as I always am with everything that’s happened in the last few years, I was saying to Tina, ‘It’s a trap, it’s a trap. It can’t possibly be her. There must be some reason they’re doing this. Don’t fall for it.’” Tiina was insistent though. She’d messaged back and traded questions with the person on the other end. What was Latifa’s nickname when the two of them practised capoeira together? Lattuf.
What was Latifa’s birthday gift to Tiina in 2014? Kung fu camp. Everything stacked up, and Tiina was now so convinced that she talked David around. “I know my friend!” she declared. Thanks to a brave worker at Latifa’s lock-up in Dubai who was willing to risk their own life, contact had been established.
Everyone involved became emboldened. “Every day that phone was used was a great risk because at any minute someone could have walked in and found it,” David said. “We never knew how long that contact would last. It could go at any minute.”
David and Tiina spoke with their friend often once contact was established. “I was speaking to her six, seven hours a day,” David told me. “I’d speak to her in the morning and in the evening. We told her not to, but she would still do it. Like, you kind of had a sister almost. It was like a little sister and that’s the struggle.” They knew that Dubai’s spin doctors would try to claim that Latifa was actually happy and healthy and suggest that perhaps the videos were recorded before she left the UAE in 2018. So, cleverly, almost all of their conversations were time stamped, and Latifa referred to what was in the news at the time, proving when the videos were made. But as productive and encouraging as the catch-ups between the princess and her friends had been, one day out of the blue the lines of communication were cut. Not long after, David tried again with simple, desperate pleas over WhatsApp: “Hello’ … ‘Helllllllo”. Latifa would never call or message from that phone again.
“Why does she not have a voice?” STEINFORT