Campsite media.
So, a while ago, we talked about how in the UAE, some wives can practically be their
husband's property.
But they can also quickly become not their property.
Now, we don't know for sure if this is what Sheikh Mohammed did with Haya, but under Sharia
law, that's all you need to say to divorce your wife.
And on February 7th, 2019, without Haya knowing about it, he ended their marriage.
It may have been a deliberate date.
It was the anniversary of her father's death.
And after that, according to Haya, things got really scary.
She said she found a gun left on her bed with a safety catch off.
A provocation.
A threat.
Then, one afternoon, Haya and the kids were at home in their Dubai Palace when one of the
Sheikh's helicopters unexpectedly touched down in the yard.
The passengers, a pilot and a few security guards, allegedly climbed out.
One said he had come to take a passenger to Alawir, a prison in the desert.
Then, Haya claims a guard said to her son,
Bubba is angry with mama.
He's going to send her to the jail and Alawir.
That's all there is there.
Haya's son clutched her leg.
She assured him the men were only joking.
But she later said she thought if Zayed were not there, they would have taken her.
In fact, one of the guards in his very same helicopter had allegedly abducted Shamsa from
England way back in 2000.
Sheikh Mohammed claimed the helicopter landed in the yard by mistake.
But Haya felt that she and her children were in danger.
And what was she going to do about that?
Run.
From campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is infamous.
I'm Vanessa Grogoriatos.
And I'm Natalie Rogennet.
You're listening to Dubai's Missing Princesses, the fourth and final episode.
Now last episode, we met Princess Haya.
And we heard about how she first spouted the party line when it came to Latifah.
We also learned about Haya's affair and Sheikh Mohammed's apparent anger about that affair.
Now this episode, we're going to find out what happens when a third princess tries to
make her escape.
That's coming up after the break.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We're going to find out what happened.
We all have questions that keep us up at night.
The self-help industry tells us they have answers.
As a journalist and a skeptic, I'm not so sure.
So I've set out to talk to people who have gone to radical links to find answers.
I'm Katherine Roland.
From something else and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Seeking.
On season one, we're diving deep into the portal of plant medicine and psychedelics.
Listen to Seeking, wherever you get your podcasts.
You're listening to infamous from campsite media.
So after all the provocation high assess she received, the threats and the messages and
the intimidation, she decided enough was enough.
In April 2019, she chartered one of the family's private planes.
I can imagine her walking up the air stair, her kids in tow, looking over her shoulder.
Just like that, she left Dubai.
Now the 45 year old princess, along with her two young children, has fled to London.
Hyal landed in the UK, which was a risky choice.
Sheikh Mo not only owned horses there, but he owned so much property and had so many ties.
The United Arab Emirates is one of Britain's closest allies in the Gulf and particularly
Dubai.
Here's journalist Louise Callahan.
The relationship between Dubai and the UK is business, business, business.
It is money.
It is the millions of pounds that every year flow from one country to the other.
Aya had ties there too.
She was the princess from Jordan, a royal twice over.
The Arab princess died.
She set up shop in one of the most expensive homes in the entire city.
A big brick house looming behind a fence.
Aya also put her political might to work.
The Jordanian embassy in London gave her the title of first secretary that gave her diplomatic
immunity, making her exempt from UK law, which was a real smart move because less than a
month after her escape, Sheikh Mohammed launched legal action in the UK courts.
He wanted his kids back and Sheikh Mo was very used to winning.
Blue Point the all-blue far side behind those soldiers calling and then cut mad across.
Blue Point all-out, dream of dream of trusting Blue Point near side Blue Point.
Right after Ascot, Haia's legal team says Sheikh Mo began an all-out media war.
More than a thousand articles about her were published in less than a month.
One of them suggested Haia was an agent of Hamas, who intended to overthrow Jordan.
British papers were suddenly filled with reports of the affair she'd had with a security guard.
The leaked information is coming from both sides.
There were later hearsay accounts that made Haia out to be the aggressor.
She showered the bodyguard with gifts, like a $15,000 watch, and a vintage shotgun that
cost nearly $60,000.
Plus, worried that he'd say something publicly, she supposedly paid the bodyguard roughly $1.2 million.
Even diplomatic immunity couldn't save her reputation now.
So she gave up her diplomatic immunity to fight back.
Together no longer, Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum and his ex-wife, Jordan's Princess Haia,
now fighting a custody battle in the High Court.
Haia presented herself as a battered wife, just trying to protect her children.
Princess Haia was in family court today.
She's hired the same lawyer as Prince Charles in his divorce from Diana.
She alleged that Sheikh Mohammed wanted to marry off one of her young kids, and she filed
an injunction usually reserved for victims of domestic abuse.
But Haia had a trump card up her sleeve.
Two, actually, Shamsa and Latifa.
Now it seems like Haia was going to play them to play Mohammed.
That's after the break.
My grandmother was murdered, likely with a candlestick.
I really thank you somebody that knew her.
My family tried to find the killer.
So I got involved.
And asked, what if it was one of us?
She did this.
It's my hometown's greatest mystery.
There's nothing people in the Delta light better than a good story.
From campsite media and Sony Music Entertainment, this is Witnessed, Devil in the Ditch.
Subscribe on Apple Podcasts to binge all episodes now, or listen weekly wherever you listen.
This is infamous from campsite media.
So far, Haia hadn't done anything publicly to support Latifa or Shamsa.
In fact, she'd loudly insisted Latifa's escape was a private family matter.
And she'd orchestrated that whole weird lunch with Mary Robinson to prove it.
Despite being a UN messenger of peace, she'd never even mentioned Shamsa.
But I imagine if Haia could prove that Sheikh Mohammed had a pattern of allegedly mistreating
his children, like Shamsa and Latifa, she'd have a better chance at winning her own custody case.
So that summer, reports emerged that she'd recently learned disturbing facts about Latifa.
So Haia's narrative that she's building up is that she didn't understand how bad everything was
in the later months of 2018 after Mary Robinson's lunch visit, then she started figuring out that,
oh wait, something actually, something really bad is happening with Latifa.
Now, a lot of people who don't know who I've spoken to have questioned that series of events.
I mean, Haia is, by all accounts, very intelligent.
She's very clued in, knows lots of people within the family as well.
She's not separated from the inner workings of the dynasty.
She knew all of it.
Whether she finally had learned the truth about Latifa,
or whether she was using Latifa's story to bolster her own,
those escapes were about to form the backbone of Haia's argument.
The court's hearings and fact findings covered both Shamsa and Latifa's stories in a lot of detail,
and it all leaked out.
She was directly contradicting everything she'd said previously.
Sheikh Mo obviously felt he had to respond to all this.
He insisted that he believed Latifa was manipulated by her bejoubeir,
who he claimed had asked for money.
Sheikh Mo said that he feared Shobeir was holding Latifa under ransom.
Here's an actor for Sheikh Mo.
I feel compelled to say that with respect,
I do not consider that this honorable court is in a position to investigate the security and intelligence issues that arose.
To this day, I consider that Latifa's return to Dubai was a rescue mission.
The allegation that Shobeir asked for money is unproven.
Shobeir denies that he ever asked for a ransom, or that he kidnapped Latifa.
As for Shamsa, Sheikh Mohammed dismissed her disappearance.
It was little more than a small misunderstanding.
He said Shamsa felt constricted by the security measures that were in place around her.
The age of majority in Dubai is 21.
From our point of view, Shamsa was still a child.
I emphasized that her mother and I jointly decided to organize a search for her,
and when she was found to remember our feeling of overwhelming relief that she was safe, it had not come to any harm.
Latifa did not appear in court in London, and neither did Shamsa.
Why?
Here's what Sheikh Mo said.
Both Shamsa and Latifa were adamant that they did not want to do this.
I gave them both the opportunity to take independent legal advice,
so that they could take an informed decision about whether and how to become involved in these proceedings.
Hia had spent many days getting in and out of a black town car outside the courthouse.
Sometimes she wore an emerald dress, sometimes a floral one,
but she was always with her attorney, Baroness Fiona Shackleton.
Don't let that fancy name fool you.
As a lawyer, the Baroness was a shark.
Finally, the judge indicated he was making his decision.
The court essentially backed up the princess's claims that Sheikh Mohammed had conducted a campaign to intimidate and frighten her.
He ruled in favor of Hia.
He believed the extensive accounts of threats made against her.
A senior judge ruled that the rule of Dubai abducted two of his daughters,
and he believed Sheikh Mohammed had orchestrated the abductions and the detentions of both Shamsa and Latifa.
Finally, walking out of court, out into the London day, Hia must have felt so vindicated.
She would later receive a roughly $730 million settlement from her divorce with Sheikh Mo,
making it one of the most expensive British divorces in history.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashida-Maktoum has been ordered by the High Court in London
to pay his sixth wife and their two children more than half a billion pounds.
Courts also ruled that the phones of Hia and two of her attorneys had either been compromised
or hacked through the use of spy software called Pegasus.
And while it's unclear which country ordered the hacking, one court found the surveillance was carried out
with Mohammed's expressor implied authority.
Now, he denied that he was involved in any hack.
But today, Hia, it seems, is free.
Now, Tina felt this was a victory too.
She felt this could be just the momentum she needed for the Free Latifa campaign.
I was kind of hoping Latifa to be free soon after I was thinking it would create a big change.
Unfortunately, it didn't work out that way.
I was quite disappointed. I don't know whether the pandemic that was just starting around that time is the blame
or what happened, but the news disappeared very soon and there was no actual change to Latifa's situation.
By then, Tina had been in touch with Latifa for more than a year.
Luckily, they hadn't lost contact yet.
She was working with David Hague, the businessman turned human rights advocate.
But in July, David says he was texting with Latifa on WhatsApp when suddenly his messages stopped going through.
His messages from me saying things like, where are you young lady?
Where are you trouble?
You know, funny little ones like that.
And then it got too high, high, high, and now we're really worried.
David wanted to think that something had just happened to Latifa's phone and she'd find some other way to reach out.
But the days turned into weeks and weeks into months.
Each day went past, we got more and more worried. We thought, is it the right time to do something? What can we do?
We'd have all these videos, we'd have all this evidence. We didn't want to release everything because it could be dangerous.
But it got to the stage and felt time had come. We had to do something.
In February 2021, clips from those videos were released to the world.
I'm a hostage.
Latifa is crawled up against a wall.
Every day I am worried about my safety in my life. The police threatened me that I'll never see the sun again.
It showed that the UAE had lied to the world.
Probably lied to Mary Robinson, let's, we don't know, lied to the UN, lied to Britain, lied to America.
And then not only lied, tried to spread fake news about the people that were telling the truth, and then tried to cover it up and spend lots of money trying to cover it up.
Now, for the first time, world leaders began recognizing Latifa's situation, like then Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
That's something, obviously, that we are concerned about.
Even Mary Robinson apologized.
I made a mistake. I went to help a friend. I was naive.
A United Nations Committee demanded proof that Latifa was alive, but the UAE responded with a weak statement.
So in May, David and his team asked Britain to freeze Sheikh Mohammed's assets.
And then, the unexpected happened.
Pictures of Latifa with some women were put on an Instagram account.
Nobody had heard from Latifa in months. Yet here was this photo of her sitting at a table at the mall of the Emirates, just sitting there between two women.
The picture appeared to be recent. Behind them, there was an ad for a movie that was released that year.
The two women were smiling brightly, both leaning an arm on the table, but Latifa, wearing all black, she looked less comfortable.
She kept her hands in her lap, and she seemed kind of scared, sort of like how she looked in that old photo with Mary Robinson.
Since the summer of 2021, more photos of Latifa have turned up. One of her in a restaurant with a woman from the first photo.
She also posted a picture with Latifa at an airport in Spain. The caption reads,
Great European Holiday with Latifa, smiley face emoji.
David Haig accepted all these photos cautiously.
She'd been there before with Mary Robinson. The UN is asking for proof of life, an independent verification of proof of life, an immediate release.
And is a picture at a cinema or is a picture in the Arrival's Hall at Madrid airport that no.
But the photos weren't nothing. The last time he talked to her, she'd been a hostage.
We all saw that somebody might kill her. The guards would do things like put razor blades under a bed and things.
I mean, it was horrific what was going on. So from that to her being in Madrid airport or being at cinema outside of the jail, however long that would last, it was obviously a better situation than before.
Because when she effectively went missing, we thought that she was dead.
David and Tina made a choice to end the Free Latifa campaign.
Now, to me, that doesn't necessarily mean the Latifa is free.
But some compromise may have been reached where she can travel outside of Dubai. There was also a picture of her in Spain.
As far as Haia is concerned, it seems only rational to think that she was led astray in the Mary Robinson incident and that she either felt that she needed to defend the shakes on her because that's what a good wife does.
Or connecting the dots, she may have been fearful for her own children and her own safety.
Regardless, the disposition of the court case seems to mean that she did get what she wanted. She is free and the shake.
He is the absolute ruler of Dubai, a descendant of the family that's been in power since it was a country of pearl divers, not real housewives.
Everyone in the West benefits from his leadership. Europe, the United States.
We need a force to combat Islamic fundamentalism in the Gulf region, and you could say that a capitalist, expat-friendly culture like Dubai functions as a spear.
But a German contractor, reaping millions, building multi-star hotels in Dubai, seems to live a very different life than some of Dubai's citizens, especially some of the royal families' women.
It's hard to feel bad for princesses. I know. But these princesses seem as though they want more than a closet of handbags. They want justice.
There have been more photos, more meetings with UN representatives, but questions remain.
Despite all of the attention Latif has escaped, no one has been brought to justice for attacking the boat near India.
Or for the treatment, Tina and the rest of the crew say they received.
Latif has sister Shamsa, the one who ran away back in 2000, has still not been seen in public for decades.
And the thing is, there are so many more strange cases involving Emirati royals.
Cases that have never really gotten any attention.
For one, Sheikh Mohammed has another ex-wife, who claims he kept her from her child.
Randa Albana, a Lebanese woman who married him in the 70s, told the Sunday time she hasn't been allowed to see their daughter since she demanded a divorce nearly 50 years ago.
Then there's Sheikh Mohammed's brother, the late Sheikh Maktoum, bin Rashid Al Maktoum.
Back in 2000, the same year Shamsa was allegedly abducted, her cousins, Maktoum's kids, were also living in England.
They were in this giant rooftop apartment in the fancy London neighbourhood of Knightsbridge, when all of a sudden, four Emirati bodyguards allegedly swooped in and escorted them away.
Their nanny called the British police. She thought they'd been kidnapped.
In the press at the time, the incident was chalked up to a disagreement between the Sheikh and his wife over where their kids should go to school.
He wanted them to return to Dubai, while she wanted them to study in London.
But it all sounds eerily similar to Shamsa, her abduction, and her desire to study abroad.
And sadly, this alleged treatment isn't a thing of the past.
We are hostage in our home.
As recently as October 2022, Sheikh Mohammed's nephew's ex-wife alleged that she faced abuse, harassment, and intimidation during a bitter custody battle.
My children and I are terrified and frightened for our lives.
It seems like the same thing just keeps happening over and over.
I mean, the Tifa is just out there, supposedly doing okay, but we don't really know.
It's almost like the world isn't watching this situation, or doesn't care.
And maybe that shouldn't be surprising, because this is a story about women seeking their freedom.
Our women, specifically.
A demographic the world likes to use as a symbol of oppression when convenient, rather than humanized with the depth reserved for other people.
And in America, we like to think that we're better than all that.
That we really are free.
But freedom means something different to everyone, and we definitely don't all have it.
For some, it's the right to work.
For others, it's the ability to have guns.
Of course, it doesn't help that the people alleged to have done wrong in this story are incredibly powerful and incredibly rich.
People in my life were even worried about me being involved in this series.
That I might disappear the next time I visit Dubai, just be hauled off at passport control and never seen again.
Or that something might happen to my family.
Thinking about all this, it's hard not to hear Latifah's voice in my head from that original 2018 video.
Freedom of choice is not something that we have.
So when you have it, you take it for granted.
And if you don't have it, it's very, very special.
I don't know how I'll feel.
Just waking up in the morning and thinking, I can do whatever I want today.
Now I'm in such a new, different feeling.
I'll be amazing.
Thank you so much for listening to our story.
We hope that the next time you hear about things like Beyonce playing a concert in Dubai for millions of dollars,
you think about the power behind that money.
Next week on Infamous, we'll find out what happens when a guy from South Dakota falls in love with a possible Russian spy.
Infamous is created and executive produced by Gabriel Sherman and me, Vanessa Rigoriatus.
This episode was co-hosted by Natalie Robamed, who wrote it with Heather Shrewing.
Producing by Heather Shrewing, Natalia Winkelman, Lily Houston Smith, and Grace Hereman.
Princess Haya and Sheikh Mohammed did not comment for this series.
Shoshish Malvets is our managing producer and editor, sound designed by David Devarro, recording by Ewan Lai Tramuen, and Fact-Tucking by Matt Giles.
Voices by Rajiv Gola and Lily Houston Smith.
Campside Media's executive producers are Josh Dean, Adam Hoth, Matt Share, and myself.
Campside Media's operations team is Doug Slaywin, Ashley Warren, and Destiny Dingle.
If you're enjoying Infamous, please rate and review the show. It helps us more than you know.
♪