Missing Emirati princess 'planned escape for seven years'
An Emirati princess who disappeared after witnesses described her being seized by commandos on a yacht had spent seven years planning her failed escape bid from the Gulf state she considered a gilded prison, according to her friends.
Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed alMaktoum is the daughter of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, Dubai’s ruler and the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates. The 32-yearold has not been seen or heard from since she was grabbed by armed men about 30 miles off the coast of India in early March, according to witnesses.
The detailed planning for her doomed escape bid is laid out for the first time in a BBC documentary, Escape From Dubai, through interviews with a French ex-spy and Finnish capoeira teacher who say they helped her plan it, and the Filipino crew that say they tried to sail her to a new life.
Latifa is the second of the Sheikh’s
daughters to try to flee a life of a caged luxury and then vanish after reports of recapture. Her older sister, Shamsa, was seized on the streets of Cambridge after fleeing the family’s Surrey estate in 2000, in an apparent abduction never fully investigated by British police.
Latifa herself said in a video recorded before her escape bid that she had previously tried to leave the UAE aged 16 but was captured at the border, jailed for three years, beaten and tortured. That experience, and that of her sister, meant she was careful in planning a second bid for freedom.
She first reached out to the French businessman and former navy officer Hervé Jaubert in 2011, he claimed, because she read online that years earlier he had escaped from Dubai after running into trouble with the authorities. He scuba-dived out to a boat and sailed to India.
When he got Latifa’s first email, he feared a set-up. “I told her: ‘Look, you are telling me you are the daughter of the ruler of Dubai, maybe it’s a trap and I need to check that you are authentic,’” he told the BBC.
He was eventually persuaded of her identity, and says that for a long time the two wrote to each other every two or three days, even though they would not meet until 2018.
He said that sometimes their correspondence was about logistics, such as when Latifa told him she had saved up $400,000 (£315,000) to pay for the escape bid, but other times it was general commentary on the strange life of a caged royal.
“I’ve been mistreated and oppressed all of my life,” she wrote one day, according to an email shared by Jaubert. “Women are treated like subhumans. My father ... can’t continue to do what he’s been doing to us all.”
In 2014, she met Tiina Jauhiainen, when she came to give lessons in capoeira, a Brazilian martial art, at a royal residence, which she described as a luxurious but oppressive complex. The Finn said she became one of Latifa’s closest friends, a skydiving partner and key to her escape plans, flying out several times to meet Jaubert and pin down details.
The break for freedom began with the two meeting for an early breakfast, which they had done many times before to dull the suspicions of royal bodyguards on the actual day, Jauhiainen