“I am a hostage”: new desperate video of the Dubai princess who wanted to flee and could not

DUBAI.- Princess Latifa, a prisoner according to her denouncing her father, the Emir of Dubai Mohammed ben Rashid al-Maktoum, one of the richest men in the world, he appealed again for his release after his forced return to the United Arab Emirates.

This time the call for help has come a desperate video of Latifa herself, filmed in secret and sent to the program “Panorama” of the British channel BBC, where the princess, daughter of the first marriage of the emir, claims to be held as a “hostage” in a family palace in Dubai. Additionally, Latifa says that in the past she has also been “drugged”.

“I’m in a mansion. I am hostage and this mansion has become a prison “, says the princess in a video recorded with a cell phone from the bathroom because “it is the only room with a door that I can close”.

“All the windows are closed (…), there are five police officers outside and two policewomen inside,” he adds. “I worry every day for my safety and my life (…) He said that I will be inside. Prison all my life and that I will never see the sun again,” he continues.

Latifa, who is now 35, He first attempted to escape Dubai when he was still a teenager, but his case went around the world in 2018, after leaving the country on a boat with a former instructor, Tiina Jauhiainen. The vessel was intercepted after eight days of sailing off the coast of India.

The princess then told her friends that wanted to escape due to restrictions imposed by his family and basically his father, and has filed public complaints about alleged abuses that UAE authorities have consistently denied.

Isolated and without contact with the outside world, she has managed to record new videos in which she insists that she is still in detention and at the mercy of her family. According to these videos, now broadcast by the BBC, the princess was alone in a house with closed doors and windows and watched by security forces, without access to doctors or lawyers.

Jauhiainen explained that she is now making these messages public because “it’s been a while” and she is worried. “I feel like she would like us to fight for her and not give up,” she told the BBC.

Embroiled in controversy after Latifa’s flight, former Irish President Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, traveled to Dubai to see the princess in person, whom she said. then described as a young woman suffering from mental problems.

Now she said she was “very concerned” about her situation. “Things have happened and I think it should be investigated,” said Robinson, who in 2018 fully endorsed the UAE authorities’ version of this media matter.

The former Irish president also said she felt “cheated” when the Dubai regime released photos of her visit because it was “a total surprise”.

AFP, DPA and ANSA agencies

THE NATION

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