Three years ago, in secluded corners of a sprawling mall in Dubai, Sheikha Latifa, the daughter of the emirate’s ruler, plotted with close friend Tiina Jauhiainen to escape her father’s clutches.
Their eventual plan was like a plot from a movie: Latifa disguised her appearance as the pair fled Dubai by car to the coast, took a dinghy and rode jet skis to a waiting boat which was to take the princess and her companion to freedom.
But it failed
They were captured off the coast of India after an operation by special forces and taken back to Dubai.
“The last time (I saw her), she was kicking and screaming and she was dragged off the boat. Her pleas for asylum were ignored,” Jauhiainen told Reuters in an interview in London in late January.
In a judgement published on Thursday, a British judge ruled that Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum had abducted Latifa — just as he had her elder sister Shamsa from England almost two decades earlier — and subjected her to inhuman treatment. Jauhiainen gave a witness statement as part of the case and briefly appeared in court in London to confirm it was true.
How did they orchestrate the escape?
In the summer of 2017, Latifa told Jauhiainen that she had not been allowed to leave Dubai since 2000 and had no passport, asked Jauhiainen for help in trying to leave her homeland again. Latifa had read the book “Escape from Dubai” by former French naval officer and spy Herve Jaubert some years before and wanted to contact him. Jauhiainen went to the Philippines to meet Jaubert and the three of them began plotting the escape. For the two women, that meant clandestine discussions in the glitzy Dubai Mall, one of the world’s largest shopping centres.
“We would find a corner, we would switch off our mobile phones. So we were taking all the precautions,” said Jauhiainen, adding that Latifa would regularly change her email address to avoid detection.
After six months, they were ready to put their plan into action. On Feb. 24, 2018, Latifa was dropped off by her driver at a cafe in downtown Dubai where she and Jauhiainen had been meeting regularly for breakfast. Inside, she went to the bathroom to change her clothes, dumped her mobile phone and the pair set off on a six-hour drive from Dubai through Oman to its coastal capital Muscat.
“I didn’t sleep for two nights before the day of the escape,” Jauhiainen said. “Latifa was sitting next to me in the front seat – she had never sat in the front seat of a car, she was excited, happy.”
At Muscat, they met a friend of Jauhiainen, got in a dinghy, clinging to the sides in stormy conditions, to reach international waters where they got onto jet skis and boarded the US-flagged boat Nostromo.
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