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