Speaker 1: Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of iHeartRadio and Grimm
Speaker 1: and Mild from aarin Manki listener Discretion advised. Curled inside
Speaker 1: the empty spare tire compartment inside the trunk of an Audi,
Speaker 1: beneath several blue bags of heavy Ikia furniture, a thirty
Speaker 1: two year old woman named Litifa held her breath. She
Speaker 1: was attempting to sneak across the border from the United
Speaker 1: Arab Emirates to Oman, where hopefully she would make it
Speaker 1: onto the boat that would bring her to international waters,
Speaker 1: where she hoped she would be free. Litifah's full name
Speaker 1: was Sheikha Latifah bint Muhammad bin Rashid al Muktum, and
Speaker 1: she was the daughter of the ruling Emir of Dubai,
Speaker 1: Sheikh Mohammed. For years, Latifah had been studying and cultivating
Speaker 1: relatelationships with people who could help her escape her repressive home.
Speaker 1: She even trained in extreme sports so that she would
Speaker 1: be ready for whatever she needed to do. That was
Speaker 1: how Latifah had met a woman named Tina Yahayanen, a
Speaker 1: Finnish woman living in Dubai, who gave Latifah private capuera lessons.
Speaker 1: Tina was the one driving the Audi across the border.
Speaker 1: She would stay with Latifa every step on the journey
Speaker 1: to freedom. Thankfully, a guard waved the car across the
Speaker 1: border into Oman without looking in the spare tire compartment.
Speaker 1: But the journey was far from over. Latifa had made
Speaker 1: arrangements for a yacht that could bring them to India, where, hopefully,
Speaker 1: with the help of a fake passport, she could fly
Speaker 1: to the United States and claim asylum. But first she
Speaker 1: needed to get sixteen miles off shore to meet the yacht.
Speaker 1: There was another contact who gave Latifa and Tina a
Speaker 1: ride in his dinghy, and though a storm pressed toward
Speaker 1: them on the horizon and locals warned the man not
Speaker 1: to go out in his small boat, Latifa had come
Speaker 1: too far to turn back. Their tiny boat pressed forward
Speaker 1: through violent waves, but still it couldn't make it all
Speaker 1: the way to the yacht, and so Latifah's next contact,
Speaker 1: a former French naval officer who had once escaped Dubai himself,
Speaker 1: where he was charged with embezzlement, rowed from the yacht
Speaker 1: with another crew member to the dinghy on jet skis.
Speaker 1: Latifa and Tina both fell into the water several times,
Speaker 1: but eventually they managed to make it onto the back
Speaker 1: of the jet skis and then safely to the yacht.
Speaker 1: The yacht was filthy and teeming with cockroaches, but they
Speaker 1: were finally in international waters, and when Latifah slept on
Speaker 1: the deck, she could see the stars. But freedom wouldn't
Speaker 1: last long. They noticed a ship was trailing them when
Speaker 1: they were about thirty miles off the coast of India.
Speaker 1: The next night, Latifa heard gunshots and boots on the deck.
Speaker 1: Commandos tied Latifa up and injected her with tranquilizers before
Speaker 1: flying her back to the place She had already risked
Speaker 1: everything to try to escape. But that wouldn't be the
Speaker 1: end of Latifah's story. She had already risked everything to
Speaker 1: try to get away, and now she wanted the world
Speaker 1: to know what she was going through. Latifa's escape attempt
Speaker 1: and its aftermath received international attention when it occurred in
Speaker 1: twenty eighteen. I'm thrilled to be talking with New Yorker
Speaker 1: staff writer Heidi Blake, who wrote about Latifah and an
Speaker 1: incredible article in May of twenty twenty three, and who's
Speaker 1: revisited the story and the story of other royal women
Speaker 1: who have attempted to escape the restrictive lives they were
Speaker 1: born into in the UAE. For The New Yorker's narrative
Speaker 1: podcast series The Runaway Princesses. I'm Dana Schwartz and this
Speaker 1: is Noble Blood.
Speaker 2: Heidi. Thank you so much for being here.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 2: I thought your piece last spring in The New Yorker
Speaker 2: was just so extraordinary, and you've continued writing about Latifa
Speaker 2: and the women like her. But before we get into
Speaker 2: Latifah's twenty eighteen escape attempt, can we go back a
Speaker 2: little bit and can you just tell me a bit
Speaker 2: Latifa's father is Sheikh Mohammed? What sort of power does
Speaker 2: he have? What sort of his political position in the
Speaker 2: United Arab Emirates.
Speaker 3: See Shee Muhammad is the ruler of Dubai and he's
Speaker 3: also the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, which
Speaker 3: is a a major strategic ally to Western governments. And
Speaker 3: so Checke Muhammad is in this interesting position because he
Speaker 3: wields absolute power at home and he also has a
Speaker 3: huge amount of power and influence on the world stage.
Speaker 3: And you know, he's a big ally of the US
Speaker 3: and of the UK. He's actually in the In the UK,
Speaker 3: he's Britain's biggest private landowner. He's the owner of the
Speaker 3: world's biggest thoroughbred race horsing team, which in the UK
Speaker 3: is a big deal because the late Queen of England
Speaker 3: was a huge horse racing fan, and he had cultivated
Speaker 3: this very valuable friendship with her through their shared love
Speaker 3: of horse racing, and so those things really play out
Speaker 3: in this story that he has this extraordinary degree of
Speaker 3: power and influence around the world and particularly in the
Speaker 3: UK as well as inside Dubai.
Speaker 2: It seems like in recent years the United Arab Emirates
Speaker 2: has sort of been making a public push saying that
Speaker 2: they're advocating for the right of women. Can you tell
Speaker 2: us a little bit though, about what the conditions are
Speaker 2: for women, some of the truth to that sort of
Speaker 2: pr blit and then what the conditions were for royal women.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's absolutely right, And it's one of the things
Speaker 3: about the story that I sort of found most striking
Speaker 3: really is that Chap Muhammad has been at pains to
Speaker 3: position himself on the world stage as a champion of
Speaker 3: women's rights within the Middle East. He's bowed to remove
Speaker 3: all of the hurdles that women face in the UAE,
Speaker 3: and he's passed a number of seemingly progressive laws guaranteeing women,
Speaker 3: for example, equal pay for equal work. He's appointed nine
Speaker 3: women to cabinet positions in the UAE's government, and many
Speaker 3: of those initiatives are spearheaded by one of his daughters.
Speaker 3: And so he has actually kind of wheeled out his
Speaker 3: own female family members as sort of emblems of his
Speaker 3: commitment to female advancement, and that has won him a
Speaker 3: lot of claudits in the West. He's been sort of
Speaker 3: praised for his for his progressive stance. But actually, what
Speaker 3: I found when I began to report on this is
Speaker 3: that women in Dubai's royal family occupy this sort of
Speaker 3: possible dual role where they're on the one hand, held
Speaker 3: up as sort of symbols of Shake Muhammad's, you know,
Speaker 3: great beneficence towards women, but actually also are expected to
Speaker 3: occupy very tightly defined roles and if they step outside
Speaker 3: of that, they can be brutally punished. And the sort
Speaker 3: of importance for Shake Muhammad in maintaining the sort of
Speaker 3: illusion of absolute power is it's essential to him basically
Speaker 3: to make sure that women in his family do not
Speaker 3: step out of line, are not seen to be challenging
Speaker 3: his authority, and it's sort of politically dangerous for him
Speaker 3: if that is the case. And so when women have
Speaker 3: challenged him, the consequences for them have been absolutely dire.
Speaker 2: One detail, just early on in your piece, almost as coloring,
Speaker 2: but that I found so incredibly striking was that Latifa
Speaker 2: was when she was an infant, was given to another
Speaker 2: of Schik Muhammad's wives sort of as a gift, as
Speaker 2: an offering, almost to raise.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's extraordinary. I mean, Chickmuhammad has six wives and
Speaker 3: around thirty children, and it's kind of fascinating the way
Speaker 3: that these kids were almost sort of a commodity. And
Speaker 3: so Latifa and her brother were both removed from their
Speaker 3: natural mother as infants and given as a gift to
Speaker 3: shake Muhammad's childless sister, who by Latifa's account, because you know,
Speaker 3: I sort of pieced this together from Latifa's own writings
Speaker 3: over the course of about a decade, where she really
Speaker 3: documented what her early life had been like. By her description,
Speaker 3: her aunt sort of almost collected stray children in her palace,
Speaker 3: and so Latifa was raised among dozens of other kids
Speaker 3: who her aunt seemed to sort of want to own,
Speaker 3: but then who were kept confined to their bedrooms and
Speaker 3: not able to go out and to play and lived
Speaker 3: really very sort of miserable and straightened lives. And she
Speaker 3: wrote really movingly about just spending days at the window
Speaker 3: kind of watching the world go by outside. And one
Speaker 3: image that just really stuck with me was she wrote
Speaker 3: about how she would dream over and over again that
Speaker 3: she was flying a kite so huge it would carry
Speaker 3: her into the sky because she was just desperate to
Speaker 3: get away, and that was a preoccupation which really defined
Speaker 3: most of her childhood and then also her adult life.
Speaker 2: So let's fast forward to Latifah's twenty eighteen escape attempt.
Speaker 2: What were those preparations like for her? Obviously, her father
Speaker 2: has so much power, so it was an incredibly dangerous
Speaker 2: prospect for her.
Speaker 3: Right exactly, And she knew what the stakes were because
Speaker 3: she'd seen what happened to other women in the royal
Speaker 3: family who tried to escape. So her own sister, Shanza,
Speaker 3: twenty years earlier, had tried to run away on a
Speaker 3: trip to the UK and had since been captured and
Speaker 3: imprisoned and held at the Heavy Sedation in the palace.
Speaker 3: Her aunt Bushra had been kidnapped from Britain after antagonizing
Speaker 3: Dubai's ruler, and had been brought back to Dubai, where
Speaker 3: she died suspiciously. And so Latifa Is sort of knew
Speaker 3: what the risks were. She herself had previously tried to
Speaker 3: escape to get help for her sister Shamza, and had
Speaker 3: been captured and imprisoned for years and beaten so badly
Speaker 3: that all the bones in her feet had been broken
Speaker 3: during prolonged torture sessions. So she knew that the risks
Speaker 3: were huge. But she wrote again and again to her
Speaker 3: supporters that she was prepared to countenance death. She was
Speaker 3: so determined to get away. She said, it's freedom or
Speaker 3: death and nothing in between. So her determination is one
Speaker 3: of the things that's so striking in the sort of
Speaker 3: letters and messages and writings that I got hold of.
Speaker 3: And she actually spent seven years planning her second escape attempt,
Speaker 3: and she planned it in extraordinary details. She recruited a
Speaker 3: team to help her, two martial arts instructors and a
Speaker 3: former French naval officer who was to captain the yacht
Speaker 3: that she escaped on, and they spent years deliberating over
Speaker 3: how she would get out of Dubai and over the
Speaker 3: border into Oman, which was where she was going to
Speaker 3: escape onto this yacht. They spent years practicing her doing
Speaker 3: an underwater swim using an underwater scooter and a scuba
Speaker 3: rebreather to try and get over the border that way,
Speaker 3: and ultimately decided that was too risky, and so eventually
Speaker 3: they decided to smuggle her over the border into Oman
Speaker 3: in the boot of a car before she used a
Speaker 3: dinghy and then jet skis to get onto this yacht
Speaker 3: that she used to make her getaway. So yeah, it
Speaker 3: was an escape attempt of just extraordinary daring.
Speaker 2: Obviously, as your story tells, when she was about thirty
Speaker 2: miles off the coast of India, commanders stormed the yacht
Speaker 2: and Latifa was captured. What went wrong in this escape.
Speaker 3: Well, I guess there were sort of a variety of
Speaker 3: things that led up to Latifa's capture, But ultimately, I
Speaker 3: think you sort of realize when you look into this
Speaker 3: that when you're up against Shake Muhammad, no one really
Speaker 3: has a chance, and you know, his global power exten
Speaker 3: and so widely that really I think sort of you know,
Speaker 3: in retrospect, Latifa's hope that she was going to be
Speaker 3: able to get away was pretty fanciful. So her father
Speaker 3: had managed to intercept her communications from on board the
Speaker 3: yacht and was able to pinpoint exactly where she was.
Speaker 3: He'd issued red notices through Interpol, the international policing agency,
Speaker 3: accusing the people who were helping her of having her kidnapped,
Speaker 3: to enlist the support of you know, international police forces.
Speaker 3: And he had then put in a call to his
Speaker 3: friend and ally, the Prime Minister of India and the
Speaker 3: Randa Mody, and persuaded Mody to send armed commandos to
Speaker 3: storm the yacht off the coast of India and capture
Speaker 3: Latifa in exchange for an arms dealer who was placed
Speaker 3: in Dubai, who Naranda Mody wanted extra dising back to India.
Speaker 3: And so this whole kind of deal was stitched up
Speaker 3: between two world leaders and Latifa was captured and dragged
Speaker 3: away back to Dubai just around a week after is
Speaker 3: setting off.
Speaker 2: When she was tranquilized and brought back to Dubai, what
Speaker 2: do we know about her treatment.
Speaker 3: Well, so she went dark for a long time after
Speaker 3: the yacht that she was on was stormed and her
Speaker 3: friends and supporters had no idea what had happened to her.
Speaker 3: Her friend Tina just describes seeing Latifa being dragged off
Speaker 3: the side of the boat shouting shoot me now, don't
Speaker 3: take me back, and then they heard nothing from her
Speaker 3: for about a year. Only after a year had gone
Speaker 3: by did Latfa supporters get a message from a woman
Speaker 3: who was attending to Latifa where she was being held,
Speaker 3: and then they kind of began this extraordinary correspondence where
Speaker 3: Latifa was being held in prison but had a secret
Speaker 3: line of communication via this maid back to her friends
Speaker 3: who were based in the UK and was able to
Speaker 3: document exactly what had happened to her, and she described
Speaker 3: being dragged off this boat, tranquilized, thrown into a desert
Speaker 3: prison where she came under concerted pressure to recount a
Speaker 3: testimony that she'd published online accusing her father of all
Speaker 3: sorts of crimes during her escape, and to kind of
Speaker 3: tell the world that she was fine and that she
Speaker 3: was living freely in Dubai, and that she was not
Speaker 3: you know that she no longer she no longer wished
Speaker 3: to leave the country, and she resisted that for years
Speaker 3: during this imprisonment, she absolutely refused to cooperate with that.
Speaker 3: But you know, eventually, in these these letters and messages
Speaker 3: videos that she was sharing with her supporters, you kind
Speaker 3: of see her will power begin to ebb away. She
Speaker 3: talks about, you know, how she's being guarded around the clock,
Speaker 3: She's not being allowed to open the window. She feels
Speaker 3: she's dying a very slow death by suffocation. Her father's
Speaker 3: guards are increasingly appearing, accompanied by a psychiatrist who's putting
Speaker 3: pressure on her, ramping up the psychological pressure on her
Speaker 3: to crack. They're telling her she'll never see the sunlight again.
Speaker 3: She lives constantly in fear of being killed by her
Speaker 3: father's guards, and I think ultimately you begin to see
Speaker 3: just the cumulative pressure become too much for her to bear.
Speaker 2: In recent years, there have been public appearances of Latifa
Speaker 2: out in the world, and two UN Human Rights Watch
Speaker 2: officials have met with her publicly. How much credence do
Speaker 2: you give to those meetings of the UN?
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, it's I mean, it's interesting. The sort of
Speaker 3: the way the story sort of resolved itself in the
Speaker 3: end is that after decades of absolutely refusing to countenance
Speaker 3: that she would ever accept a life in Dubay under
Speaker 3: her father's control, and you know, saying again and again,
Speaker 3: I will never accept that, and I will always be
Speaker 3: imprisoned as long as I'm here, and I will never
Speaker 3: be free until I'm outside Dubai. Latifa suddenly lost all
Speaker 3: contact with her supporters and then soon after started appearing
Speaker 3: in what appeared to be kind of carefully stage managed
Speaker 3: social media photographs and then ultimately had this, you know,
Speaker 3: these meetings with UN Human Rights officials, and they're sort
Speaker 3: of complicated because it happened in two stages. So one
Speaker 3: of those took place during her imprisonment. She was photographed
Speaker 3: with Mary Robinson, who was the former UN Human Rights
Speaker 3: Commissioner and who released a statement afterwards with photographs of
Speaker 3: Latifa and said to the media that Latifa was mentally ill,
Speaker 3: regretted her attempt to escape, and was now safe in
Speaker 3: the loving care of her family. Mary Robinson subsequently retracted
Speaker 3: that and said she'd been horribly tricked into saying those
Speaker 3: things after videos of Latifa appeared in which she accused
Speaker 3: her father of holding her hostage and said she was
Speaker 3: a prisoner. But then after she a second time, lost
Speaker 3: contact with her supporters, and then started to appear in
Speaker 3: these social media posts. She met with Michelle Bachelet, who
Speaker 3: is Mary Robinson's successor as U and Human Rights Commissioner,
Speaker 3: who released a statement to say that Latifa had assured
Speaker 3: her that she was well and living as she wishes
Speaker 3: to and just wished, you know, wish to be left
Speaker 3: alone to live her life in peace. I spoke to
Speaker 3: Michelle Bachelet after that statement, and she acknowledged to me
Speaker 3: that while she'd said that, actually she was far from
Speaker 3: convinced that Latifa was actually safe and well. Certain couldn't
Speaker 3: rule out that Latifa had come to this meeting with
Speaker 3: her under durest and had been put under pressure to
Speaker 3: say those things. It's certainly hard for me, having spent
Speaker 3: many months kind of immersed in Latifa's writings and the
Speaker 3: recordings that she left behind, and just those sort of
Speaker 3: decades of determination on her part, never to give in,
Speaker 3: never to surrender, never to accept a life under her
Speaker 3: father's control. It's very hard to imagine that she has suddenly,
Speaker 3: of her own free will, completely reversed course and all
Speaker 3: of that and decided that she really does just want
Speaker 3: to live in Dubai. You know, I think clearly the
Speaker 3: stance that she has now taken is at least a
Speaker 3: product of years of torture, imprisonment and abuse, an extreme duress.
Speaker 3: And of course it's possible that she's being outright coerced
Speaker 3: and you know, is being threatened into saying these things.
Speaker 3: I think, given what we know about the way Shapemhammad
Speaker 3: has treated his daughters and other women in the family,
Speaker 3: nothing is off limits in terms of what he would
Speaker 3: be willing to do to crush their rebellions, to bring
Speaker 3: them to heal. And so I don't think anyone should
Speaker 3: rest assured that Latifa is well and is living freely.
Speaker 2: One thing that is just very clear in your story
Speaker 2: is that Latifa's family is just incredibly powerful and I
Speaker 2: will say frightening. Were you nervous at all investigating and
Speaker 2: publishing your story?
Speaker 3: I think I was certainly conscious that shap Muhammad's government
Speaker 3: has no compunction about sort of digital surveillance on journalists
Speaker 3: and things like that. You know, one of the things
Speaker 3: that came out in the course of a court battle
Speaker 3: between shape Mohammad and his his youngest wife, Princess High
Speaker 3: who's another princess who ran away from him to the
Speaker 3: UK seeking protection. Was that Shane Muhammad had used his
Speaker 3: you know, his intelligence agencies had hacked Higher's phone and
Speaker 3: the phones of her lawyers and various supporters with the
Speaker 3: Pegasus Israeli spyware, and that subsequently some supporters of Latifa's
Speaker 3: found that Pegasus was also on their phones. And so
Speaker 3: I was conscious that that sort of thing was certainly
Speaker 3: a possibility of not a likelihood, and was therefore sort
Speaker 3: of careful about digital security to the extent that any
Speaker 3: of us really can be these days. But you know,
Speaker 3: it's yeah, I mean, I think beyond that, I just
Speaker 3: feel incredibly lucky to live in a country where, for all,
Speaker 3: for all Britain's many failians, I think, you know, it's
Speaker 3: a pretty safe place to go about your work as
Speaker 3: a journalist. I think it would have been quite a
Speaker 3: different thing traveling to de Buy and doing reporting there,
Speaker 3: because I think there are a real risks to journalists
Speaker 3: in that region, and you know, but I'm lucky to
Speaker 3: operate in a pretty safe country for this kind of work.
Speaker 3: And so I wasn't I wasn't too nervous for my
Speaker 3: sort of physical safety, but certainly, yeah, conscious of the
Speaker 3: kind of digital security side of things you alluded to.
Speaker 2: Princess Hio, as you said, was Shiekmhammad's youngest wife, was
Speaker 2: involved in a court bettal and ultimately was able to
Speaker 2: win a settlement and win custody of their children to
Speaker 2: live in England. Can you speak a little bit about
Speaker 2: her experience.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Princess Hia's case is a really interesting one because
Speaker 3: she's kind of the one who got away, I mean
Speaker 3: literally the one who got away. I think that that
Speaker 3: is really due entirely to her independent status as the
Speaker 3: daughter of the former king of Jordan, a member of
Speaker 3: the Jordanian royal family, and a woman who, unlike other
Speaker 3: women in Shamhamon's family, actually had a considerable amount of
Speaker 3: power and status in her own right. And you know,
Speaker 3: while U is an important ally to Western governments, so
Speaker 3: is Jordan. That comes with a certain inviolability. I think
Speaker 3: that wasn't there for Shakemhammad's own children. So when Princess
Speaker 3: hire ran away to the UK in twenty nineteen with
Speaker 3: her two young children, she was actually afforded the diplomatic
Speaker 3: position at the Jordan embassy, which gave her immunity and protection.
Speaker 3: She was then able sort of under that cover to
Speaker 3: apply to the courts for court protection. Her children were
Speaker 3: made wards of the Court in the UK, which meant
Speaker 3: they couldn't be removed from the country without court permission.
Speaker 3: She was then able to bring a claim against Shapemuhammad
Speaker 3: in the British courts, which actually provided a forum for
Speaker 3: a lot of the evidence of his abuse of his
Speaker 3: daughters to come out, because she cited his abuse of
Speaker 3: both Latifa and her sister Shamza as evidence of the
Speaker 3: threat that Shae Muhammad posed to her and to her
Speaker 3: own children. And so those masters were adjudicated in a
Speaker 3: British court. The judge held a kind of fact finding
Speaker 3: process and ultimately ruled that indeed Chich Muhammad had kidnapped
Speaker 3: and in prison Shamza and Latifa. And so that was
Speaker 3: kind of an extraordinary development in this story, this moment
Speaker 3: where one of these women was actually able to get
Speaker 3: out and get the truth out there. And it was
Speaker 3: kind of interesting because Hire had played a pretty ambiguous
Speaker 3: role in all of this up until that point, because
Speaker 3: she had been the person who arranged this lunch between
Speaker 3: Latifa and Mary Robinson for the product of which were
Speaker 3: these photographs, and then this statement by Mary Robinson that
Speaker 3: Latifa was mentally unwell and basically shouldn't be believed and
Speaker 3: Hire had sort of therefore been part of this propaganda
Speaker 3: campaign by Ship Muhammad's government to try to dispel international
Speaker 3: concern about Latifa, and then shortly afterwards actually ran away
Speaker 3: herself and said help me, I'm in danger, and actually
Speaker 3: by way of proved look what he's doing to Latifa,
Speaker 3: and so you know, she kind of there was this
Speaker 3: extraordinary reversal on her part and so's, yeah, she's a
Speaker 3: fascinating character in all of this, and she's still living
Speaker 3: in the She actually won the biggest dull settlement in
Speaker 3: British legal history against Shapemhammed, and yeah, really sort of
Speaker 3: delivered a pretty resounding blow to his reputation in this
Speaker 3: court action that she was able to bring in all
Speaker 3: of the appalling abuses that it brought to light.
Speaker 2: Latifa's sister, Shamsa, as you alluded to, had also attempted
Speaker 2: to escape when she was in England, and she was
Speaker 2: unsuccessful and wasn't able to claim asylum in England. Can
Speaker 2: you briefly just just walk us through sort of what
Speaker 2: Chamser's escape attempt had been like.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, I mean, so Chansa's escape is really the
Speaker 3: sort of inciting incident that set off a whole chain
Speaker 3: of events here that ultimately ended up with Latifa repeatedly
Speaker 3: trying to escape herself, because Lativa's escape attempts were to
Speaker 3: try to get help for Shamsa and Chanza had clashed
Speaker 3: with shape Mohammed increasingly as she kind of grew older
Speaker 3: as a teenager. She wanted to study, she wants she
Speaker 3: wants to travel, she wants to go to university. She
Speaker 3: didn't want to wear the a buyers, she wanted to
Speaker 3: be able to drive, she wanted you know, those those
Speaker 3: those sorts of freedoms that women in the West enjoy,
Speaker 3: and she was denied all of that, and increasingly sort
Speaker 3: of had this strained relationship with her father, and so
Speaker 3: ultimately decided, when she was in her late teens that
Speaker 3: she would run away. And she waited till she and
Speaker 3: and some other members of the family had traveled to
Speaker 3: Shakee Mohammed's summer house in the UK. She was staying
Speaker 3: there with with the entourage, and she waited till after
Speaker 3: dark one night and then slipped away and managed to
Speaker 3: find a range rover that had been left unattended in
Speaker 3: the ground, and she drove it out to the perimeter
Speaker 3: of the estate, dumped the car and slipped through a
Speaker 3: gate on foot and dumped her mobile phone and then
Speaker 3: just sort of disappeared into the night, and it was
Speaker 3: it was weeks before she was tracked down. She managed
Speaker 3: to kind of stay on the run, find friends to
Speaker 3: stay with, and she actually managed to contact an immigration lawyer,
Speaker 3: a guy called Paul Simon, and asked him to help
Speaker 3: her get asylum in the UK. She kind of walked
Speaker 3: into this office of this small time lawyer and said,
Speaker 3: I'm a runaway princess from the Dubai royal family, please
Speaker 3: can you help me? Which must have been a pretty
Speaker 3: extraordinary walking but he basically advised her that he wasn't
Speaker 3: going to be able to help her because she didn't
Speaker 3: have a passport. She'd left that behind at the house,
Speaker 3: and so she was sort of out on her own,
Speaker 3: and in her desperation, she turned to one of her
Speaker 3: father's guards in the UK, a guy who she had
Speaker 3: sort of come to trust over the course of her
Speaker 3: summer's there, and asked him to help her. And instead
Speaker 3: of helping her, he lured her into a kidnapping. She
Speaker 3: was then dragged back to her father's estate and put
Speaker 3: on a helicopter and then a private jet back to Dubai,
Speaker 3: where she was held for decades under heavy sedation and
Speaker 3: under constant guard, and as far as we know, still
Speaker 3: is being held following that attempt all these years ago.
Speaker 2: I was about to say, we've gotten these sort of
Speaker 2: heavily manicured photos on social media of Latifa, but is
Speaker 2: there any evidence that Chamsa is alive.
Speaker 3: No, Shamsa really has sort of disappeared without trace. The
Speaker 3: last chen pinpoint Shamsa's whereabouts is that there is an
Speaker 3: extraordinary record that Latifa created of a meeting between the
Speaker 3: two sisters, which was in the summer of twenty nineteen
Speaker 3: in their father's desert compound. And they were actually both
Speaker 3: summoned to meet shae Mohammad because they've been called to
Speaker 3: testify in Princess Hya's case in London and he wanted
Speaker 3: to make sure that they didn't do this, and so
Speaker 3: he summoned them both to ask them to provide a
Speaker 3: statement say they didn't wish to testify. When they refused
Speaker 3: to comply, he just wrote to the court on their
Speaker 3: behalf and said, my daughters have no wish to have
Speaker 3: any part in this, but Shamsu and Nativa sort of
Speaker 3: had this private moment together, and it's one of the things.
Speaker 3: We've just released a podcast series about this story. And
Speaker 3: one of the things for me that sort of most
Speaker 3: compelling is to hear these extraordinary tapes that Theatifa made
Speaker 3: during her imprisonment, and that some of these tapes after
Speaker 3: the meeting with Shamsa are some of the most haunting
Speaker 3: for me because just the raw pain and emotion in
Speaker 3: her voice as she describes this moment of seeing her sister,
Speaker 3: who she just adored and who she'd fought for and
Speaker 3: she tried twice to escape for to try and get help,
Speaker 3: she'd risked her life for. When this coming, this brief
Speaker 3: coming together of these two women before they were wrenched
Speaker 3: apart again, it's just absolutely heartrending. And after that, we
Speaker 3: have no record of what happened to Shamsa. None of
Speaker 3: the Royal insiders I spoke with were able to shed
Speaker 3: any light on where she was or knew where she was.
Speaker 3: When I spoke with Michelle Bashade, the former You and
Speaker 3: Human Rights Commissioner who met with Latifa, She said that
Speaker 3: something that had really struck her was that Latifa was
Speaker 3: reasonably composed during their meeting, but when she asked about Shamsa,
Speaker 3: Latifa had become suddenly very firm and had said, no,
Speaker 3: I will not discuss my sister. I will I'm here
Speaker 3: to talk about myself, and I will not ask answer
Speaker 3: questions about her. And it seemed odd that she was.
Speaker 3: There was such a hard line there, like there was
Speaker 3: just something there that Latifa was absolutely not going to
Speaker 3: go near. And so, you know, one dreads to think
Speaker 3: what Shamsa's situation might be. You know, certainly for the
Speaker 3: decades since she attempted to escape as a teenager, it
Speaker 3: has been absolutely dire.
Speaker 2: And one thing that I found uniquely heartbreaking and a
Speaker 2: little frightening that you detailed in your investigation was how
Speaker 2: when English detective inspectors were trying to look into this case,
Speaker 2: they were fairly continually stymied by higher up saying it's
Speaker 2: none of our concern. Was that for political reasons?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean that was one of the sort of
Speaker 3: real central mysteries of all of this was sort of
Speaker 3: what happened to these attempts by the police to investigate
Speaker 3: you know, in Chansa's case, she showed extraordinary resourcefulness as
Speaker 3: an eighteen year old on the run, and that she
Speaker 3: managed to instruct this lawyer to act for her, and
Speaker 3: then having been kidnapped, she managed to get hold of
Speaker 3: a phone and get a message to her lawyer saying
Speaker 3: that she wanted the police to be involved, and her
Speaker 3: lawyer then decided to ignore this and do nothing about it.
Speaker 3: She then, after another six months of imprisonment, managed again
Speaker 3: to get a message to her lawyer and this time
Speaker 3: the police. You know, the police were notified that she
Speaker 3: was alleging that she'd been kidnapped from the UK and
Speaker 3: I was a detective who attempted to investigate. But he
Speaker 3: described how you just were sort of blocked at every
Speaker 3: turn and ultimately was told that he wasn't going to
Speaker 3: be allowed to travel to Dubai to try to investigate
Speaker 3: shams in situation, and so he decided to kind of
Speaker 3: step away from the case. And you know, he certainly
Speaker 3: felt clearly that that was politically motivated. You know, he
Speaker 3: said to me, because you're a rich and powerful enough person,
Speaker 3: you can break any law you like in our country
Speaker 3: and get away with it, and that that had always
Speaker 3: really frustrated him. And that was something I heard from
Speaker 3: multiple police officers and also former government officials. I spoke
Speaker 3: to you, that the relationship with the UAE was just
Speaker 3: too strategically important for the government to compromise, you know,
Speaker 3: over the individual fate of one or two or three princesses,
Speaker 3: and they just weren't prepared to go to the map
Speaker 3: for these women. They kind of viewed it as a
Speaker 3: private family matter. And officials I spoke to you were
Speaker 3: pretty you know, pretty confident that these sorts of things,
Speaker 3: you know, blow over, and that they knew that. One
Speaker 3: of them said that, you know, when and these sort
Speaker 3: of things blew up with these members of Shapemhammad's family.
Speaker 3: You know, they felt fairly confident they would be a
Speaker 3: forty eight hour wonder and then everybody would move on
Speaker 3: and forget. And I think that's right, you know, I
Speaker 3: think they did get away with allowing this to happen
Speaker 3: and shape Muhammad continues to enjoy a very cordial relationship
Speaker 3: with the British government and you know, and is esteemed
Speaker 3: on the world stage as you know, a progressive leader
Speaker 3: in the Middle East. And despite all of this, that
Speaker 3: continues to be the case.
Speaker 2: Well, that is a lot to think about. Heidi Blake.
Speaker 2: To read more, read her incredible investigative reporting in The
Speaker 2: New Yorker and listen to The New Yorker's brand new
Speaker 2: podcast series, The Runaway Princesses. Thank you so much for
Speaker 2: being here.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much, Daniel. This is a real pleasure.
Speaker 1: Noble Blood is a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and
Speaker 1: Mild from Aaron Manki. Noble Blood is created and hosted
Speaker 1: by me Dana Shwarts, with additional writing and researching by
Speaker 1: Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman.
Speaker 1: The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and
Speaker 1: rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive
Speaker 1: producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more
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