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0:00
Welcome to Noble Blood, a production
0:03
of iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild
0:05
from aarin Manki listener Discretion
0:07
advised. Curled
0:12
inside the empty spare tire
0:14
compartment inside the trunk of an
0:17
Audi, beneath several blue
0:19
bags of heavy Ikia furniture,
0:22
a thirty two year old woman named
0:24
Litifa held her breath.
0:27
She was attempting to sneak across
0:29
the border from the United Arab
0:31
Emirates to Oman, where
0:34
hopefully she would make it onto
0:36
the boat that would bring her to international
0:39
waters, where she hoped
0:41
she would be free. Litifah's
0:44
full name was Sheikha Latifah
0:46
bint Muhammad bin Rashid al Muktum,
0:49
and she was the daughter of the ruling
0:52
Emir of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed.
0:55
For years, Latifah
0:57
had been studying and cultivating
0:59
relatelationships with people who
1:01
could help her escape her
1:03
repressive home. She even
1:06
trained in extreme sports
1:08
so that she would be ready for whatever
1:10
she needed to do. That was
1:13
how Latifah had met a woman named
1:15
Tina Yahayanen, a Finnish
1:17
woman living in Dubai, who
1:19
gave Latifah private capuera
1:22
lessons. Tina was the
1:24
one driving the Audi across
1:26
the border. She would stay with
1:28
Latifa every step on
1:30
the journey to freedom. Thankfully,
1:33
a guard waved the car across the
1:35
border into Oman without looking in
1:37
the spare tire compartment. But
1:40
the journey was far from over. Latifa
1:43
had made arrangements for a yacht
1:45
that could bring them to India, where,
1:48
hopefully, with the help of a fake
1:50
passport, she could fly to
1:52
the United States and claim asylum.
1:55
But first she needed to get sixteen
1:58
miles off shore to meet the yacht.
2:01
There was another contact who gave Latifa
2:03
and Tina a ride in his dinghy,
2:06
and though a storm pressed toward
2:08
them on the horizon and locals
2:10
warned the man not to go out in
2:13
his small boat, Latifa
2:15
had come too far to turn back.
2:18
Their tiny boat pressed forward
2:20
through violent waves, but
2:22
still it couldn't make it all the way
2:24
to the yacht, and so Latifah's
2:27
next contact, a former French
2:30
naval officer who had once escaped
2:32
Dubai himself, where he was charged
2:34
with embezzlement, rowed from
2:36
the yacht with another crew member to
2:39
the dinghy on jet skis. Latifa
2:42
and Tina both fell into the
2:44
water several times, but eventually
2:47
they managed to make it onto the back of
2:49
the jet skis and then safely
2:52
to the yacht. The yacht
2:54
was filthy and teeming with cockroaches,
2:57
but they were finally in international
3:00
waters, and when Latifah
3:02
slept on the deck, she could see
3:04
the stars. But freedom
3:07
wouldn't last long. They
3:09
noticed a ship was trailing them
3:11
when they were about thirty miles off the
3:14
coast of India. The next
3:16
night, Latifa heard gunshots
3:18
and boots on the deck. Commandos
3:22
tied Latifa up and injected
3:24
her with tranquilizers before
3:26
flying her back to the place She
3:28
had already risked everything to
3:31
try to escape. But that
3:33
wouldn't be the end of Latifah's story.
3:36
She had already risked everything to try
3:38
to get away, and now she
3:40
wanted the world to know what
3:43
she was going through. Latifa's
3:46
escape attempt and its aftermath
3:48
received international attention when
3:51
it occurred in twenty eighteen. I'm
3:53
thrilled to be talking with New Yorker staff
3:56
writer Heidi Blake, who wrote about
3:58
Latifah and an incredible article
4:00
in May of twenty twenty three, and
4:03
who's revisited the story and
4:05
the story of other royal women who have
4:07
attempted to escape the restrictive
4:10
lives they were born into in the UAE.
4:13
For The New Yorker's narrative podcast
4:15
series The Runaway Princesses.
4:19
I'm Dana Schwartz and this
4:21
is Noble Blood.
4:24
Heidi. Thank you so much for being here.
4:26
Thank you so much for having me.
4:28
I thought your piece last spring in The
4:30
New Yorker was just so extraordinary, and
4:32
you've continued writing about
4:34
Latifa and the women like her. But before
4:37
we get into Latifah's
4:39
twenty eighteen escape attempt, can
4:41
we go back a little bit and can you just tell
4:43
me a bit Latifa's father is
4:45
Sheikh Mohammed? What sort
4:48
of power does he have? What sort of his political
4:50
position in the United Arab Emirates.
4:53
See Shee Muhammad is the ruler
4:55
of Dubai and he's also the Prime Minister of
4:57
the United Arab Emirates, which
4:59
is a a major strategic ally to
5:02
Western governments. And so Checke
5:04
Muhammad is in this interesting position because he wields
5:06
absolute power at home and he also
5:09
has a huge amount of power and influence
5:11
on the world stage. And
5:13
you know, he's a big ally of the US
5:16
and of the UK. He's actually in the In the
5:18
UK, he's Britain's biggest private
5:20
landowner. He's the owner of the world's
5:22
biggest thoroughbred race horsing team,
5:25
which in the UK is a big deal because the late
5:27
Queen of England was a huge horse racing fan,
5:29
and he had cultivated this very valuable
5:32
friendship with her through their shared love of horse
5:34
racing, and so those things really play out
5:36
in this story that he has this extraordinary
5:39
degree of power and influence around the world
5:41
and particularly in the UK as
5:43
well as inside Dubai.
5:46
It seems like in recent years the
5:48
United Arab Emirates has sort of been making a public
5:51
push saying that they're advocating
5:53
for the right of women. Can you tell us
5:55
a little bit though, about what the conditions
5:58
are for women, some of the truth
6:01
to that sort of pr blit and then what the
6:03
conditions were for royal women.
6:05
Yeah, that's absolutely right, And it's one of the things about
6:07
the story that I sort of found most striking really
6:10
is that Chap Muhammad has been at pains to
6:12
position himself on the world
6:14
stage as a champion of women's rights
6:16
within the Middle East. He's
6:18
bowed to remove all of the hurdles that
6:20
women face in the UAE,
6:23
and he's passed a number of seemingly
6:25
progressive laws guaranteeing women, for
6:27
example, equal pay for equal work. He's
6:29
appointed nine women to cabinet positions
6:32
in the UAE's government, and many of those
6:34
initiatives are spearheaded by one of his daughters.
6:37
And so he has actually kind of wheeled
6:39
out his own female family members as sort
6:41
of emblems of his commitment to female advancement,
6:44
and that has won him
6:46
a lot of claudits in the West. He's been
6:48
sort of praised for his for
6:50
his progressive stance. But actually,
6:54
what I found when I began to report
6:56
on this is that women in Dubai's royal
6:58
family occupy this sort of possible
7:00
dual role where they're on the one hand,
7:03
held up as sort of symbols
7:05
of Shake Muhammad's, you know, great
7:07
beneficence towards women, but actually also
7:10
are expected to occupy very tightly
7:12
defined roles and if they step outside
7:14
of that, they can be brutally punished.
7:17
And the sort of importance for Shake Muhammad
7:19
in maintaining the
7:22
sort of illusion of absolute
7:24
power is it's essential
7:26
to him basically to make sure that women in his family
7:29
do not step out of line, are
7:31
not seen to be challenging his authority, and it's
7:33
sort of politically dangerous for him if that is
7:35
the case. And so when women have
7:37
challenged him, the consequences
7:39
for them have been absolutely dire.
7:42
One detail, just early on in your piece,
7:44
almost as coloring, but that I found so incredibly
7:46
striking was that Latifa was when
7:49
she was an infant, was given to
7:51
another of Schik Muhammad's wives
7:54
sort of as a gift, as an offering, almost
7:56
to raise.
7:57
Yeah, it's extraordinary. I mean, Chickmuhammad
7:59
has six wives and
8:02
around thirty children, and it's kind
8:04
of fascinating the way that these kids
8:07
were almost sort of a commodity. And
8:09
so Latifa and her brother
8:12
were both removed from their natural
8:14
mother as infants and given as a gift
8:16
to shake Muhammad's childless sister, who
8:19
by Latifa's account, because you know, I sort
8:21
of pieced this together from Latifa's own
8:24
writings over the course of about
8:26
a decade, where she really documented what her early
8:28
life had been like. By her description, her
8:30
aunt sort of almost collected stray children
8:33
in her palace, and so Latifa was raised
8:35
among dozens of other kids
8:37
who her aunt seemed to sort
8:39
of want to own, but then
8:42
who were kept confined to their bedrooms
8:44
and not able to go out and to play
8:47
and lived really very sort
8:49
of miserable and straightened lives. And she
8:51
wrote really movingly about just
8:53
spending days at the window kind
8:55
of watching the world go by outside. And
8:58
one image that just really stuck with me was
9:01
she wrote about how she would dream over
9:03
and over again that she was flying a kite so
9:05
huge it would carry her into the sky because
9:08
she was just desperate to get away,
9:10
and that was a preoccupation which really
9:13
defined most of
9:15
her childhood and then also her adult
9:17
life.
9:18
So let's fast forward to Latifah's
9:21
twenty eighteen escape attempt.
9:23
What were those preparations like
9:25
for her? Obviously, her father has so much
9:27
power, so it was an incredibly
9:30
dangerous prospect for her.
9:32
Right exactly, And she knew what the
9:34
stakes were because she'd seen what happened to
9:36
other women in the royal family who tried
9:38
to escape. So her own sister, Shanza,
9:41
twenty years earlier, had tried to run away on a
9:43
trip to the UK and had since been
9:46
captured and imprisoned and held at the Heavy Sedation
9:48
in the palace. Her aunt Bushra
9:50
had been kidnapped from Britain after antagonizing
9:54
Dubai's ruler, and had been brought
9:56
back to Dubai, where she died suspiciously.
9:59
And so Latifa Is sort of knew what the
10:01
risks were. She herself had previously
10:03
tried to escape to get help for her sister Shamza,
10:06
and had been captured and imprisoned for years
10:08
and beaten so badly that all the bones
10:10
in her feet had been broken during prolonged
10:13
torture sessions. So she knew
10:16
that the risks were huge. But she wrote again
10:18
and again to her supporters that she
10:20
was prepared to countenance death. She was
10:22
so determined to get away. She said,
10:24
it's freedom or death and nothing in between.
10:27
So her determination is one of the things that's so
10:29
striking in the sort of letters
10:32
and messages and writings that I
10:34
got hold of. And she actually spent
10:36
seven years planning her second escape
10:39
attempt, and she planned it in
10:41
extraordinary details. She recruited a team
10:43
to help her, two martial arts
10:45
instructors and a
10:47
former French naval officer who
10:50
was to captain the yacht that she escaped
10:52
on, and they spent years
10:54
deliberating over how she would get out
10:56
of Dubai and over the border into
10:58
Oman, which was where she was going to escape onto
11:01
this yacht. They spent years practicing
11:03
her doing an underwater
11:06
swim using an underwater
11:08
scooter and a scuba rebreather to
11:10
try and get over the border that way, and ultimately decided
11:12
that was too risky, and so eventually
11:15
they decided to smuggle her over the border into
11:17
Oman in the boot of a car before
11:19
she used a dinghy and then jet skis to get
11:21
onto this yacht that she used
11:23
to make her getaway. So yeah, it was an
11:26
escape attempt of just extraordinary
11:28
daring.
11:29
Obviously, as your story tells,
11:32
when she was about thirty miles off the coast of
11:34
India, commanders stormed
11:36
the yacht and Latifa was
11:39
captured. What went wrong in this
11:41
escape.
11:42
Well, I guess there were sort
11:44
of a variety of things that led
11:46
up to Latifa's capture, But ultimately,
11:49
I think you sort of realize when
11:51
you look into this that when you're up against
11:54
Shake Muhammad, no one really has
11:56
a chance, and you know, his
11:58
global power exten and so widely
12:01
that really I think sort
12:03
of you know, in retrospect, Latifa's hope
12:05
that she was going to be able to get away was
12:08
pretty fanciful. So her
12:10
father had managed to intercept
12:13
her communications from on board the yacht and was
12:15
able to pinpoint exactly
12:18
where she was. He'd issued
12:20
red notices through Interpol, the international
12:22
policing agency, accusing the people who were helping
12:24
her of having her kidnapped, to enlist
12:27
the support of you know, international
12:29
police forces. And
12:31
he had then put in a call to his
12:33
friend and ally, the Prime Minister of India and the Randa
12:36
Mody, and persuaded Mody to send
12:38
armed commandos to storm the yacht off the coast
12:40
of India and capture Latifa in
12:43
exchange for an arms dealer
12:45
who was placed in Dubai, who Naranda
12:47
Mody wanted extra dising back to India.
12:50
And so this whole kind of deal was stitched up
12:52
between two world leaders
12:54
and Latifa was captured
12:57
and dragged away back to Dubai just around
12:59
a week after is setting off.
13:02
When she was tranquilized and brought
13:04
back to Dubai, what do we know about her
13:06
treatment.
13:07
Well, so she went dark
13:09
for a long time after the yacht that she
13:12
was on was stormed and her friends and supporters
13:14
had no idea what had happened to her. Her friend
13:16
Tina just describes seeing Latifa
13:19
being dragged off the side of the boat shouting
13:21
shoot me now, don't take me back, and
13:23
then they heard nothing from her for about
13:25
a year. Only after a
13:27
year had gone by did Latfa supporters
13:30
get a message from a woman who
13:32
was attending to Latifa where she was
13:34
being held, and then
13:36
they kind of began this extraordinary correspondence
13:39
where Latifa was being held in prison but
13:41
had a secret line of communication via
13:43
this maid back to her
13:45
friends who were based in the UK and
13:48
was able to document exactly what had
13:50
happened to her, and she described being
13:52
dragged off this boat, tranquilized,
13:55
thrown into a desert prison where
13:58
she came under concerted pressure
14:00
to recount a testimony
14:03
that she'd published online accusing
14:05
her father of all sorts of crimes during her escape,
14:08
and to kind of tell the world that she
14:10
was fine and that she was
14:12
living freely in Dubai, and that she was not you
14:15
know that she no longer she no longer wished to leave the country,
14:18
and she resisted that for years
14:21
during this imprisonment, she absolutely refused to
14:23
cooperate with that. But you
14:25
know, eventually, in these these letters
14:27
and messages videos that she was sharing
14:29
with her supporters, you kind of see her
14:31
will power begin to ebb away. She
14:34
talks about, you know, how she's being guarded around
14:36
the clock, She's not being allowed to open the window.
14:39
She feels she's dying a very slow death by suffocation.
14:43
Her father's guards are increasingly appearing,
14:45
accompanied by a psychiatrist who's putting
14:47
pressure on her, ramping up the psychological
14:49
pressure on her to crack. They're telling her
14:52
she'll never see the sunlight again. She
14:54
lives constantly in fear of being killed
14:56
by her father's guards, and I
14:58
think ultimately you begin to see
15:01
just the cumulative pressure become too
15:03
much for her to bear.
15:05
In recent years, there have been public
15:08
appearances of Latifa out
15:10
in the world, and two UN
15:13
Human Rights Watch officials have
15:15
met with her publicly. How
15:17
much credence do you give to those meetings
15:20
of the UN?
15:21
Well, yeah, it's I mean, it's interesting. The
15:24
sort of the
15:26
way the story sort of resolved itself
15:28
in the end is that after decades
15:32
of absolutely refusing to countenance
15:35
that she would ever accept a life in Dubay under
15:37
her father's control, and you know, saying again
15:39
and again, I will never accept that, and
15:43
I will always be imprisoned as long as
15:45
I'm here, and I will never be free until I'm
15:47
outside Dubai. Latifa suddenly
15:50
lost all contact with her supporters and then soon
15:52
after started appearing in what appeared to be
15:55
kind of carefully stage managed
15:57
social media photographs and then
15:59
ultimately had this, you
16:01
know, these meetings with UN Human Rights
16:04
officials, and they're sort
16:06
of complicated because it happened in two stages. So one
16:08
of those took place during her imprisonment. She
16:11
was photographed with Mary Robinson, who was the former
16:13
UN Human Rights Commissioner and who
16:16
released a statement afterwards with photographs
16:18
of Latifa and said to the media that Latifa
16:21
was mentally ill, regretted her
16:23
attempt to escape, and was now safe in the loving
16:25
care of her family. Mary Robinson subsequently
16:28
retracted that and said she'd been horribly tricked
16:30
into saying those things after videos
16:32
of Latifa appeared in which
16:34
she accused her father of holding her hostage and said
16:36
she was a prisoner. But then after
16:39
she a second time, lost contact with her supporters,
16:41
and then started to appear in these social media
16:44
posts. She met with Michelle Bachelet,
16:46
who is Mary Robinson's successor as
16:48
U and Human Rights Commissioner, who released
16:52
a statement to say that Latifa had assured her that she
16:54
was well and living as she wishes to and
16:57
just wished, you know, wish to be left alone to live her
16:59
life in peace. I spoke
17:02
to Michelle Bachelet
17:04
after that statement, and she
17:06
acknowledged to me that while she'd said
17:08
that, actually she was far from convinced that Latifa
17:11
was actually safe and well.
17:14
Certain couldn't rule out that Latifa had come to
17:16
this meeting with her under durest and had been put under
17:18
pressure to say those things. It's
17:20
certainly hard for me, having spent
17:23
many months kind of immersed in Latifa's
17:26
writings and the recordings that she left
17:28
behind, and just those
17:30
sort of decades of determination on her part,
17:33
never to give in, never to surrender, never
17:35
to accept a life under her father's
17:37
control. It's very hard to imagine
17:39
that she has suddenly, of her own
17:41
free will, completely reversed
17:44
course and all of that and decided that she really does
17:46
just want to live in Dubai. You know, I think clearly
17:49
the stance that she has
17:51
now taken is at
17:54
least a product of years of
17:57
torture, imprisonment and abuse, an
18:00
extreme duress. And of course it's
18:02
possible that she's being
18:04
outright coerced and you know,
18:07
is being threatened into saying these things. I
18:09
think, given what we know about the way Shapemhammad
18:11
has treated his daughters and other women in the family,
18:14
nothing is off limits in terms
18:16
of what he would be willing to do to crush
18:19
their rebellions, to bring them to heal.
18:22
And so I don't think anyone
18:25
should rest assured that Latifa
18:27
is well and is living freely.
18:30
One thing that is just very clear
18:33
in your story is that Latifa's family is
18:35
just incredibly powerful and I will say
18:37
frightening. Were you nervous at
18:40
all investigating and publishing
18:42
your story?
18:43
I think I was certainly conscious
18:46
that shap Muhammad's government has
18:48
no compunction about sort of digital
18:51
surveillance on journalists and things
18:53
like that. You know, one of the things that came
18:56
out in the course of a
18:58
court battle between shape Mohammad and his his
19:00
youngest wife, Princess High who's another princess
19:02
who ran away from him to the UK
19:05
seeking protection. Was that Shane
19:07
Muhammad had used his you know, his intelligence agencies
19:09
had hacked Higher's phone and the
19:11
phones of her lawyers and various supporters
19:14
with the Pegasus Israeli
19:17
spyware, and that subsequently
19:19
some supporters of Latifa's found that Pegasus
19:22
was also on their phones. And so I was
19:24
conscious that that sort of thing was certainly a
19:27
possibility of not a likelihood, and was
19:29
therefore sort of careful about digital
19:32
security to the extent
19:34
that any of us really can be these
19:36
days. But you know, it's yeah,
19:39
I mean, I think beyond
19:41
that, I just feel incredibly
19:44
lucky to live in a country where,
19:46
for all, for all Britain's many
19:49
failians, I think, you know, it's
19:52
a pretty safe place to go about your
19:54
work as a journalist. I think it would have
19:56
been quite a different thing traveling to de Buy and doing
19:58
reporting there, because I think there are a real risks
20:01
to journalists in that region, and you
20:03
know, but I'm lucky to operate in a pretty safe
20:05
country for this kind of work. And
20:08
so I wasn't I wasn't too nervous
20:10
for my sort of physical safety, but certainly, yeah, conscious
20:12
of the kind of digital security side of things you
20:15
alluded to.
20:16
Princess Hio, as you said, was Shiekmhammad's
20:19
youngest wife, was involved in a court bettal
20:21
and ultimately was able to win a
20:23
settlement and win custody of their
20:26
children to live in England. Can you speak
20:28
a little bit about her experience.
20:31
Yeah, Princess Hia's case is a really interesting
20:33
one because she's kind of the one who got
20:36
away, I mean literally the one who
20:38
got away. I think that that is really
20:42
due entirely to her independent
20:45
status as the daughter of
20:47
the former king of Jordan, a member of the Jordanian
20:49
royal family, and a woman who, unlike
20:52
other women in Shamhamon's family, actually had a
20:54
considerable amount of power and status in her own
20:57
right. And you know, while
21:00
U is an important ally to Western governments,
21:02
so is Jordan. That comes with a certain
21:04
inviolability. I think that wasn't there
21:07
for Shakemhammad's own children. So when
21:09
Princess hire ran away to the
21:12
UK in twenty nineteen with her two young
21:14
children, she was actually afforded
21:17
the diplomatic position at the Jordan embassy, which
21:19
gave her immunity and protection. She
21:22
was then able sort of under that cover to
21:25
apply to the courts for court protection. Her
21:27
children were made wards of the Court in the
21:29
UK, which meant they couldn't be removed from the country
21:31
without court permission. She was then
21:34
able to bring a claim against
21:36
Shapemuhammad in the British courts, which
21:38
actually provided a forum for a lot of the evidence
21:40
of his abuse of his daughters to come out,
21:43
because she cited his abuse
21:45
of both Latifa and her sister Shamza
21:47
as evidence of the threat that Shae Muhammad
21:49
posed to her and to her own children. And
21:51
so those masters were adjudicated in a British court.
21:53
The judge held a kind of fact finding process
21:56
and ultimately ruled that indeed Chich Muhammad
21:58
had kidnapped and in prison Shamza
22:00
and Latifa. And so that was kind
22:02
of an extraordinary development in this story, this
22:05
moment where one of these women was actually
22:07
able to get out and get the truth out there.
22:09
And it was kind of interesting because Hire had played
22:12
a pretty ambiguous role in all
22:14
of this up until that point, because
22:17
she had been the person who arranged
22:19
this lunch between Latifa and Mary Robinson
22:23
for the product of which were these photographs, and
22:25
then this statement by Mary Robinson
22:27
that Latifa was mentally unwell and basically
22:30
shouldn't be believed and Hire had
22:32
sort of therefore been part of this propaganda campaign
22:35
by Ship Muhammad's government to try to
22:37
dispel international concern about
22:39
Latifa, and then shortly afterwards
22:42
actually ran away herself and said
22:44
help me, I'm in danger, and
22:46
actually by way of proved
22:48
look what he's doing to Latifa, and so
22:51
you know, she kind of there was this extraordinary
22:53
reversal on her part and so's,
22:56
yeah, she's a fascinating character in all of this, and
22:58
she's still living in the She
23:01
actually won the biggest dull settlement
23:03
in British legal history against Shapemhammed,
23:06
and yeah, really
23:08
sort of delivered a pretty
23:10
resounding blow to his reputation in this
23:13
court action that she was able to bring in all of the
23:15
appalling abuses that it brought to light.
23:19
Latifa's sister, Shamsa, as you alluded
23:21
to, had also attempted to escape
23:24
when she was in England, and she was unsuccessful
23:27
and wasn't able to claim asylum
23:29
in England. Can you briefly just just
23:32
walk us through sort of what Chamser's escape
23:34
attempt had been like.
23:37
Yeah, absolutely, I mean, so Chansa's
23:39
escape is really the sort of inciting incident
23:42
that set off a whole chain of events here that ultimately
23:44
ended up with Latifa repeatedly trying
23:46
to escape herself, because Lativa's escape
23:48
attempts were to try to get help for Shamsa
23:51
and Chanza had clashed
23:54
with shape Mohammed increasingly as
23:56
she kind of grew
23:58
older as a teenager. She wanted
24:01
to study, she wants she wants to travel,
24:03
she wants to go to university. She didn't
24:05
want to wear the a buyers, she wanted to be able to drive,
24:08
she wanted you know, those
24:11
those those sorts of freedoms that women
24:14
in the West enjoy, and
24:16
she was denied all of that, and increasingly
24:19
sort of had this strained relationship with her father, and so
24:21
ultimately decided, when she was in her late
24:24
teens that she would run away. And she
24:26
waited till she and and
24:28
some other members of the family had traveled to Shakee
24:30
Mohammed's summer house in the UK. She
24:33
was staying there with with
24:36
the entourage, and she waited
24:39
till after dark one night and then
24:41
slipped away and managed to find
24:45
a range rover that had been left unattended
24:47
in the ground, and she drove it out to the perimeter
24:50
of the estate, dumped the car and
24:52
slipped through a gate on foot and
24:55
dumped her mobile phone and then just sort of disappeared
24:57
into the night, and it was it
24:59
was weeks before she was tracked
25:01
down. She managed to kind of stay on
25:03
the run, find friends
25:06
to stay with, and she actually managed to contact
25:08
an immigration lawyer, a guy called
25:11
Paul Simon, and asked him to help her get
25:13
asylum in the UK. She kind of walked
25:15
into this office of this small time lawyer and
25:17
said, I'm a runaway princess
25:19
from the Dubai royal family, please can you help me?
25:22
Which must have been a pretty extraordinary walking but
25:25
he basically advised her that he wasn't going to be able to
25:27
help her because she didn't have a passport. She'd
25:29
left that behind at the house, and so she was
25:31
sort of out on her own, and in her
25:33
desperation, she turned to one
25:36
of her father's guards in the UK, a
25:38
guy who she had sort of come to trust
25:41
over the course of her summer's there, and asked
25:43
him to help her. And instead of helping
25:46
her, he lured her into
25:48
a kidnapping. She was then dragged
25:51
back to her father's estate and put on a helicopter
25:54
and then a private jet back to Dubai,
25:56
where she was held
25:59
for decades under
26:01
heavy sedation and under constant guard,
26:04
and as far as we know, still
26:07
is being held following
26:10
that attempt all these years ago.
26:12
I was about to say, we've gotten these sort
26:14
of heavily manicured photos
26:17
on social media of Latifa,
26:19
but is there any evidence that
26:22
Chamsa is alive.
26:24
No, Shamsa really has sort
26:26
of disappeared without trace. The
26:29
last chen pinpoint Shamsa's
26:31
whereabouts is that there is an extraordinary
26:34
record that Latifa created of a meeting
26:36
between the two sisters, which
26:39
was in the summer of twenty nineteen in
26:41
their father's desert compound. And
26:44
they were actually both summoned to
26:46
meet shae Mohammad because they've been
26:48
called to testify in Princess Hya's case
26:50
in London and he
26:52
wanted to make sure that they didn't do this,
26:56
and so he summoned them both to ask
26:58
them to provide a statement say they didn't wish to testify.
27:01
When they refused to comply, he just wrote
27:03
to the court on their behalf and said, my daughters have no wish
27:06
to have any part in this, but Shamsu
27:08
and Nativa sort of had this private moment together,
27:11
and it's one of the things. We've just released a
27:13
podcast series about this story.
27:15
And one of the things for me that sort of most compelling
27:18
is to hear these extraordinary
27:21
tapes that Theatifa made during her imprisonment,
27:23
and that some of these tapes after the meeting with Shamsa
27:25
are some of the most haunting for me
27:28
because just the raw pain
27:30
and emotion in her voice as she describes
27:33
this moment of seeing her sister, who
27:35
she just adored and who she'd fought for and
27:39
she tried twice to escape
27:41
for to try and get help, she'd risked her life for.
27:44
When this coming, this brief coming together of these
27:46
two women before they were wrenched apart again, it's just
27:48
absolutely heartrending. And after that,
27:51
we have no record of what happened
27:53
to Shamsa. None of the Royal insiders I
27:55
spoke with were able to shed any light on
27:57
where she was or knew where she was. When
28:00
I spoke with Michelle Bashade, the former You and
28:02
Human Rights Commissioner who met with Latifa, She
28:05
said that something that had really struck her was that Latifa
28:08
was reasonably composed during their meeting, but
28:10
when she asked about Shamsa, Latifa
28:12
had become suddenly very
28:16
firm and had said, no, I will not discuss
28:18
my sister. I will I'm here to talk
28:20
about myself, and I will not ask answer questions
28:22
about her. And it seemed odd
28:26
that she was. There was such a hard line
28:28
there, like there was just something there that
28:30
Latifa was absolutely not going
28:32
to go near. And so, you
28:35
know, one dreads to think what Shamsa's
28:39
situation might be. You know, certainly
28:41
for the decades since she attempted to escape
28:44
as a teenager, it has been absolutely
28:46
dire.
28:47
And one thing that I found uniquely
28:50
heartbreaking and a little frightening
28:53
that you detailed in your investigation was
28:56
how when English
28:58
detective inspectors were trying
29:00
to look into this case, they were fairly
29:03
continually stymied by higher
29:06
up saying it's none of our concern. Was
29:08
that for political reasons?
29:11
Yeah, I mean that was one of the sort of real
29:15
central mysteries of all of this was sort of what
29:17
happened to these attempts by the police to investigate
29:21
you know, in Chansa's case,
29:23
she showed extraordinary resourcefulness
29:25
as an eighteen year old on the run, and that she managed
29:28
to instruct this lawyer to act
29:30
for her, and then having been kidnapped,
29:32
she managed to get hold of a phone and
29:34
get a message to her lawyer saying
29:36
that she wanted the police to be involved, and
29:38
her lawyer then decided to ignore
29:41
this and do nothing about it. She
29:43
then, after another six months of imprisonment,
29:46
managed again to get a message to her lawyer
29:48
and this time the police. You know, the police were
29:50
notified that she was alleging that she'd been kidnapped
29:53
from the UK and I was a
29:55
detective who attempted to investigate.
29:58
But he described how you
30:00
just were sort of blocked at every turn and ultimately
30:02
was told that he wasn't going to be allowed
30:04
to travel to Dubai to try to investigate
30:07
shams in situation, and so he
30:09
decided to kind of step away from the case.
30:12
And you know, he certainly felt
30:14
clearly that that was politically motivated. You
30:16
know, he said to me, because you're a rich
30:18
and powerful enough person, you can break any law you
30:20
like in our country and get away with it, and
30:23
that that had always really frustrated
30:25
him. And that was something I heard from
30:27
multiple police officers and also
30:30
former government officials. I spoke to you, that the
30:32
relationship with the UAE was just too strategically
30:35
important for the government to compromise,
30:38
you know, over the individual
30:40
fate of one or two or three princesses,
30:43
and they just weren't prepared
30:46
to go to the map for these women. They kind of viewed
30:48
it as a private family matter. And
30:51
officials I spoke to you were pretty you know, pretty
30:53
confident that these sorts of things, you
30:55
know, blow over, and that they knew
30:58
that. One of them said that, you know, when and
31:00
these sort of things blew up with these members
31:02
of Shapemhammad's family. You know, they felt
31:04
fairly confident they would be a forty eight hour wonder
31:06
and then everybody would move on and forget.
31:09
And I think that's right, you know, I think they
31:12
did get away with allowing this to happen and
31:16
shape Muhammad continues to enjoy a very
31:18
cordial relationship with the British government
31:20
and you know, and is
31:23
esteemed on the world stage as you know, a
31:26
progressive leader in the Middle East. And
31:28
despite all of this, that continues to be the case.
31:31
Well, that is a lot to think about.
31:34
Heidi Blake. To read more, read
31:36
her incredible investigative reporting
31:39
in The New Yorker and listen to The New Yorker's
31:41
brand new podcast series, The Runaway
31:43
Princesses. Thank you so much for being
31:45
here.
31:46
Thank you so much, Daniel. This is a real pleasure.
31:53
Noble Blood is a production of
31:56
iHeartRadio and Grim and
31:58
Mild from Aaron Manki. Noble
32:00
Blood is created and hosted by
32:03
me Dana Shwarts, with additional
32:05
writing and researching by Hannah
32:07
Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira
32:10
Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori
32:12
Goodman. The show is edited
32:14
and produced by Noemi Griffin
32:17
and rima Il Kahali, with
32:19
supervising producer Josh Thain
32:22
and executive producers Aaron Manke,
32:24
Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick.
32:27
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