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Dubai ruler ordered abduction of daughters: UK judge
AFP
AFP/File / KARIM SAHIB
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum, 70, applied to the UK's highest court to block the publication of two judgments in the case against his wife
Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al-Maktoum ordered the abduction of two of his daughters and subjected his former wife to a "campaign of fear and intimidation", forcing her to flee to London with their two children, according to a British court ruling made public on Thursday.
Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein, 45, fled the United Arab Emirates last April having become "terrified" of her husband, who is also the vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates.
Soon afterwards, the 70-year-old sheikh applied for their two children -- a son aged eight and a 12-year-old daughter -- to be returned to the Gulf kingdom.
But Princess Haya, a half-sister of Jordan's King Abdullah II, applied for the children to be made wards of court and filed a non-molestation order for herself.
She asked during a London hearing for a judge to make findings of fact about the kidnapping and forced detention of two of the sheikh's adult daughters from a previous marriage.
She also alleged she had faced a "campaign of fear and intimidation" since she left last year.
- Seized and detained -
Sheikh Mohammed, who owns the Godolphin horse racing stable, tried to prevent two of the court rulings being made public.
But the Supreme Court rejected his application on Thursday morning, allowing them to be published.
Judge Andrew McFarlane, who heads the Family Division of the High Court of England and Wales, found Sheikh Mohammed "ordered and orchestrated" the abduction of Sheikha Shamsa from the UK city of Cambridge when she was 19 in August 2000.
She was forcibly returned to Dubai and "has been deprived of her liberty for much, if not all, of the past two decades", he said.
He also found Shamsa's sister, Latifa, 35, was seized and returned to Dubai twice, in 2002 and again in 2018.
She was held "on the instructions of her father" for more than three years after the first attempted escape. Her second made global headlines in March 2018.
Claims by a friend of Latifa who helped her escape that Indian special forces boarded a boat off the Indian coast on March 4, 2018 before she was returned to Dubai were also found to be proven.
"She was pleading for the soldiers to kill her rather than face the prospect of going back to her family in Dubai," McFarlane said.
"Drawing these matters together I conclude, on the balance of probability, that Latifa's account of her motives for wishing to leave Dubai represents the truth.
"She was plainly desperate to extricate herself from her family and prepared to undertake a dangerous mission in order to do so."
- Secret divorce -
Lawyer Charles Geekie, representing Princess Haya, said at a hearing last November that his client had been left anonymous notes threatening the lives of her son and daughter.
She also told the court of "deliberate threats" and even of a helicopter landing outside her house when the pilot told her he had come to take a passenger to a desert prison.
The court was also told the sheikh divorced Princess Haya without her knowledge on February 7, 2019 -- the 20th anniversary of the death of her father king Hussein of Jordan.
Judge McFarlane said it was "clear the date will have been chosen... to maximise insult and upset to her".
He agreed with Geekie that events since 2000 showed "a number of common themes, at the core of which is the use of the state and its apparatus to threaten, intimidate, mistreat and oppress with a total disregard for the rule of law".
"I also accept Mr Geekie's submission that these findings, taken together, demonstrate a consistent course of conduct over two decades where, if he deems it necessary to do so, the father will use the very substantial powers at his disposal to achieve his particular aims."
- One-sided -
In a statement after the publication of the rulings, Sheikh Mohammed strongly denied the claims and said the case involved "highly personal and private matters relating to our children".
He said he appealed to the Supreme Court "to protect the best interests and welfare of the children".
"The outcome does not protect my children from media attention in the way that other children in family proceedings in the UK are protected," he said, calling the process one-sided.
"As a head of government, I was not able to participate in the court's fact-finding process."
Judge: Dubai ruler threatened wife, had daughters abducted
AP
FILE - In this Sunday, Jan 17, 2016 file photo, Princess Haya bint al-Hussein, the wife of the Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai, attends a press conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. A British court has found that the ruler of Dubai conducted a campaign of fear and intimidation against his estranged wife and ordered the abduction of two of his daughters, documents unsealed Thursday, March 5, 2020 show. (AP Photo/Martin Dokoupil, file)
LONDON (AP) — The ruler of Dubai conducted a campaign of fear and intimidation against his estranged wife and ordered the abduction of two of his daughters, a British judge ruled in documents that were unsealed Thursday.
A judge at the High Court in London found that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, 70, “acted in a manner from the end of 2018 which has been aimed at intimidating and frightening” his ex-wife Princess Haya, 45.
Judge Andrew McFarlane also said the sheikh “ordered and orchestrated” the abductions and forced return to Dubai of two of his adult daughters from another marriage: Sheikha Shamsa in August 2000, and Sheikha Latifa in 2002 and again in 2018.
The judge made rulings in December and January after a battle between the estranged spouses over the welfare of their two children, but the sheikh fought to prevent them from being made public. The U.K Supreme Court quashed that attempt on Thursday.
Princess Haya, daughter of the late King Hussein of Jordan, married the Dubai ruler in 2004, becoming his second official wife, the court said. Sheikh Mohammed also has several unofficial wives. The couple have a daughter, Jalila, 12, and 8-year-old son Zayed, the youngest of the ruler’s 25 children.
In April 2019, Princess Haya fled the Gulf emirate with her children, saying she had become terrified of her husband’s threats and intimidation.
The threats continued after the princess moved to London, the judge said, adding that the sheikh had used the apparatus of the state “to threaten, intimidate, mistreat and oppress with a total disregard for the rule of law.”
In May 2019, Sheikh Mohammed launched legal action, seeking the children’s return to Dubai, while Princess Haya asked for them to be made wards of the British court and stay in the U.K.
The sheikh later dropped his bid to take the children back to Dubai, and fought unsuccessfully to prevent the court issuing a fact-finding judgment on his wife’s allegations.
The judge found that Haya’s allegations about the threats and abductions met the civil standard of proof on the balance of probabilities.
Princess Haya also alleged that Sheikh Mohammed had made arrangements for Jalila — then aged 11 — to be married to the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. The judge said the hearsay evidence for that allegation fell “well short of the required standard” of proof.
Sheikh Mohammed, who is also vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, is popular at home and is seen as a modernizing force. He has, however, faced criticism abroad following reports that his daughter Latifa tried to flee the country and was forcibly returned.
McFarlane supported the allegation that “on two occasions in June 2002 and February 2018, the father ordered and orchestrated the forcible return of his daughter Latifa, now 35, to the family home in Dubai. In 2002 the return was from the border of Dubai with Oman, and in 2018 it was by an armed commando assault at sea near the coast of India.”
The judge said Shamsa, now 38, was abducted from the streets of Cambridge and “has been deprived of her liberty for much if not all of the past two decades.”
Sheikh Mohammed is also the founder of the successful Godolphin horse racing stable and last year received a trophy from Queen Elizabeth II after one of his horses won a race at Royal Ascot. The judge noted that both he and his ex-wife “are said to be on respectful and friendly terms with the British Royal Family.”
Haya, a graduate of Oxford University, is also a keen equestrian and competed in show jumping for Jordan at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She was a two-term president of the International Equestrian Federation and an International Olympic Committee member.
In a statement released after the rulings were published, the sheikh said that “as a head of government, I was not able to participate in the court’s fact-finding process. This has resulted in the release of a ‘fact-finding’ judgment which inevitably only tells one side of the story. ”
“I ask that the media respect the privacy of our children and do not intrude into their lives in the U.K.,” he said.
Princess Haya: I feared Dubai ruler would abduct my kids
LONDON (Reuters) - Jordanian Princess Haya bint al-Hussein told London’s High Court that she feared her former husband, the ruler of Dubai, would abduct her two children, take them back to the Gulf Arab state and prevent her from ever seeing them again.
FILE PHOTO: Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, the wife of Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and her lawyer Baroness Fiona Shackleton arrive at the High Court in London, Britain, February 28, 2020. REUTERS/Tom Nicholson
Haya, 45, half-sister of Jordan’s King Abdullah, came to Britain with her two children in April last year and has been embroiled in a court case in London over their future with Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum of Dubai.
The hearings have been held in private, but on Thursday restrictions were lifted allowing the media to report that senior British judge Andrew McFarlane had ruled Mohammed had orchestrated a campaign of intimidation against Haya.
The judge also said Haya’s allegations that the sheikh had ordered the abduction and later torture of two of his daughters by another marriage - Shamsa and Latifa - were proved.
The sheikh’s lawyers rejected the allegations, made by Haya’s legal team and later backed by McFarlane in his “findings of fact”.
They had argued that Haya wanted to distract from her affair with one of her bodyguards, which McFarlane said had taken place sometime in 2017 or 2018.
Last November, Haya appeared in the dock of the grand, wood-paneled Court 33 in London’s High Court to recount how she feared that her children - Jalila, 12, and Zayed, 8 - might suffer the same fate as their half-sisters.
Shamsa, then 18, was snatched from the streets of Cambridge in England in 2000 while her younger sister Latifa was abducted from a boat in international waters off India in 2018, McFarlane ruled.
“I really can’t get the idea that it might be the last time I see them if they go to see him and that is unsafe,” she told the High Court during her brief appearance that lasted around 10 minutes.
“It’s not just him I’m worried about. It’s the people around him, people that I know. I know how they operate. I have seen what has happened to their sisters and I can’t face the fact that the same might happen to them.”
Throughout the hearings, spread over nine months since last May, she has been in court, at times looking tearful, at others disdainful of the arguments put forward by her former husband’s legal team.
Giving her evidence, she spoke clearly as she said she had come to doubt the United Arab Emirates’ official account about Latifa.
McFarlane accepted that Latifa had been abducted from a U.S.-flagged boat off the coast of India in March, 2018 and taken back to Dubai, the second time she had unsuccessfully tried to flee from the emirate.
In a video she made before her 2018 escape attempt, she described her father as “pure evil” and said that if people were watching it, she was in a “very bad situation”.
The failed escape: Sheikha Latifa's doomed flight from Dubai
LONDON (Reuters) - Three years ago, in secluded corners of a sprawling mall in Dubai, Sheikha Latifa, the daughter of the emirate’s ruler, plotted with close friend Tiina Jauhiainen to escape her father’s clutches.
Their eventual plan was like a plot from a movie: Latifa disguised her appearance as the pair fled Dubai by car to the coast, took a dinghy and rode jet skis to a waiting boat which was to take the princess and her companion to freedom.
But it failed. They were captured off the coast of India after an operation by special forces and taken back to Dubai.
“The last time (I saw her), she was kicking and screaming and she was dragged off the boat. Her pleas for asylum were ignored,” Jauhiainen told Reuters in an interview in London in late January.
In a judgment published on Thursday, a British judge ruled that Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum had abducted Latifa - just as he had her elder sister Shamsa from England almost two decades earlier - and subjected her to inhuman treatment.
Jauhiainen gave a witness statement as part of the case and briefly appeared in court in London to confirm it was true.
“In making an overall assessment of the evidence relating to Latifa, I regard the evidence of Tiina Jauhiainen as being of singular importance,” the judge, Andrew McFarlane, said in his ruling, which described her as a “wholly impressive individual.”
The fitness instructor first met Latifa in late 2010 when she started giving her lessons in capoeira, a martial art, about five times a week.
They became close friends but she said Latifa was quiet and private. It was years before Latifa confided in her, revealing she had tried to escape Dubai in 2002 when she was a teenager and that she had subsequently spent three-and-a-half years in prison.
Reuters was not able independently to confirm Jauhiainen’s version of events, which she has recounted to media before.
“It was only around 2016 when she started telling me about her sister Shamsa and her escape and her own imprisonment,” said Jauhiainen, a Finnish national.
“I think she was very scared. She could have been imprisoned again.”
The government’s Dubai Media Office did not respond to a Reuters request for comment for this story.
FORMER FRENCH SPY
In the summer of 2017, Latifa, who told Jauhiainen that she had not been allowed to leave Dubai since 2000 and had no passport, asked Jauhiainen for help in trying to leave her homeland again.
Latifa had read the book “Escape from Dubai” by former French naval officer and spy Herve Jaubert some years before and wanted to contact him.
Jauhiainen went to the Philippines to meet Jaubert and the three of them began plotting the escape. For the two women, that meant clandestine discussions in the glitzy Dubai Mall, one of the world’s largest shopping centers.
“We would find a corner, we would switch off our mobile phones. So we were taking all the precautions,” said Jauhiainen, adding that Latifa would regularly change her email address to avoid detection.
“It was a bit scary so we didn’t want anyone to overhear the conversations or follow us or anything like that.”
Jaubert told Reuters that he planned the escape with Latifa and subsequently asked Jauhiainen to meet him in the Philippines on six or seven occasions to train her.
After six months, they were ready to put their plan into action. On Feb. 24, 2018, Latifa was dropped off by her driver at a cafe in downtown Dubai where she and Jauhiainen had been meeting regularly for breakfast.
Inside, she went to the bathroom to change her clothes, dumped her mobile phone and the pair set off on a six-hour drive from Dubai through Oman to its coastal capital Muscat.
“I didn’t sleep for two nights before the day of the escape,” Jauhiainen said. “Latifa was sitting next to me in the front seat - she had never sat in the front seat of a car, she was excited, happy.”
At Muscat, they met a friend of Jauhiainen, got in a dinghy, clinging to the sides in stormy conditions, to reach international waters where they got onto jet skis and boarded the U.S.-flagged boat Nostromo***.
COMMANDO OPERATION
They were heading for Goa on India’s west coast where Latifa hoped to journey on to the United States to seek asylum.
But on March 4 they were intercepted by commando units from India and the United Arab Emirates, Jauhiainen said.
“We had Indian coastguard boats surrounding us, there were helicopters, aeroplanes, the whole boat was filled with smoke,” she said. “They looted the boat, they beat the crew. Latifa was kidnapped kicking and screaming and the rest of us were kidnapped as well and taken to UAE.”
Jaubert said he captained the vessel and witnessed the raid. He said Indian navy commandos attacked and Latifa was taken off the boat by an Emirati officer. He added that he was beaten for 45 minutes, but did not specify by whom.
Reuters could not independently confirm his account.
Raveesh Kumar, a spokesman for India’s foreign ministry, did not respond to a request for comment on India’s alleged role in the operation.
Jauhiainen did not see Latifa again. In Dubai, she said she was threatened, held in solitary confinement and interrogated. She did not specify where or by whom.
“I was told I had stabbed the ruler of Dubai in the back by helping (his) daughter escape,” she said.
Two weeks before the attempted escape, Latifa made a 45-minute video recording in Jauhiainen’s apartment which she passed to supporters outside Dubai in case she failed to get away.
That video, in which Latifa launched an excoriating attack on her father, was made public after it went to UK-based campaign group Detained in Dubai and was posted on YouTube.
Three weeks after being taken back to Dubai, Jauhiainen was released and left.
Despite having lived in Dubai for 17 years, those who knew her no longer stay in contact, Jauhiainen said.
Jauhiainen said that most visitors to Dubai lived in a bubble of sun, sea and shopping malls, and did not know the truth about the country.
“If the daughters of rulers get locked up for just wanting to be free, what about the rest of the people there?”
***NOSTROMO THE NAME OF THE SPACESHIP IN ALIEN
WHICH SHOULD HAVE BEEN AN IMMEDIATE INDICATION SOMETHING WAS HINKY
Nostromo is a 1904 novel by Joseph Conrad. Nostromo may also refer to: Nostromo (TV serial), a 1997 British-Italian TV serial; Nostromo, the fictional starship in ...
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Nostromo is an Italian expatriate who has risen to his position through his bravery and daring exploits. ("Nostromo" is Italian for "shipmate" or "boatswain", but the name could also be considered a corruption of the Italian phrase "nostro uomo" or "nostr'uomo", meaning "our man").
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NOSTROMO: A TALE OF THE SEABOARD
Dubai's ruler abducted daughters and threatened former wife, UK judge rules
LONDON (Reuters) - Dubai’s ruler ordered the abduction of two daughters and orchestrated a campaign of intimidation against his former wife, a British judge has ruled, in what is likely to be a major blow to his reputation as a Middle East reformer.
FILE PHOTO: Jordanian Princess Haya bint Al-Hussein and her husband, Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum (C), walk to the parade ring on Ladies Day, the third day of horse racing at Royal Ascot in southern England June 17, 2010. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
Judge Andrew McFarlane said he accepted as proved a series of allegations made by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum’s former wife, Princess Haya bint al-Hussein, during a custody battle over their two children at London’s High Court.
Haya, the half-sister of Jordan’s King Abdullah, fled to London on April 15 last year with the children, Jalila, 12, and Zayed, 8, fearing for her safety amid suspicions that she had had an affair with one of her British bodyguards.
Her lawyers argued that Mohammed’s treatment of two older daughters by another marriage showed her children were at risk of being abducted too.
As part of the custody case, Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Court division in England and Wales, made a series of “findings of fact” about allegations raised by Haya, 45, during hearings over the last nine months.
McFarlane said he accepted her claim that Mohammed arranged for his daughter Shamsa, then aged 18, to be kidnapped off the streets of Cambridge in central England in 2000, and had her flown back to Dubai.
He also ruled it was proved that the sheikh had arranged for Shamsa’s younger sister Latifa to be snatched from a boat in international waters off India by Indian forces in 2018 and returned to the emirate in what was her second failed escape attempt.
Both remained there “deprived of their liberty”, McFarlane said.
After the ruling became public on Thursday, Mohammed said it only represented “one side of the story”.
“As a Head of Government, I was not able to participate in the court’s fact-finding process, this has resulted in the release of a ‘fact-finding’ judgment which inevitably tells only one side of the story,” he said in a statement issued by his lawyers.
He said a decision to allow the judgments to be made public did not protect his children “from media attention in the way that other children in family proceedings in the UK are protected”.
INTIMIDATION
In the judgments, McFarlane accepted that the sheikh subjected Haya to a campaign of intimidation which made her fear for her life.
He said the sheikh, who married Haya in 2004, had divorced her on the 20th anniversary of the death of her father King Hussein of Jordan, timing she said was deliberate.
“I have ... concluded that, save for some limited exceptions, the mother has proved her case with respect to the factual allegations she has made,” McFarlane said.
The sheikh, 70, vice-president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirates, did not appear himself during the court case and instructed his lawyers not to put forward a challenge to the claims, which his lawyers said he rejected.
The judgment does not amount to a determination of criminal guilt but it is likely to deal a reputational blow to the sheikh, regarded globally as the visionary force behind Dubai’s leap on to the international stage.
Asked how the findings might impact on the United Kingdom’s business relations with Dubai, British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab told Reuters in Riyadh: “We’ll look at it very carefully before jumping to any conclusions.”
Haya’s lawyers suggested that the British Foreign Office had intervened to stifle a police probe into Shamsa’s disappearance, and McFarlane said the detective in charge had been refused permission to interview potential witnesses in Dubai.
However, the judge added it was “not possible to find on the balance of probability” that there had been direct intervention by the Foreign Office triggered by Mohammed or Dubai.
RESTRICTIONS LIFTED
The judge’s conclusions were made in December but could only be reported after restrictions were lifted after the UK Supreme Court earlier rejected Mohammed’s request for permission to appeal against their publication.
McFarlane said the allegations made by Haya about the abduction and torture of Shamsa and Latifa and the threats made against her were proved, with the exception of her claim that an arranged marriage was being sought between Jalila and Saudi’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Last July, the judge had issued a temporary forced marriage protection order in respect of Jalila over Haya’s fears but said these were only based on hearsay evidence.
“The allegations that the father ordered and orchestrated the kidnap and rendition to Dubai of his daughters Shamsa and Latifa are of a very high order of seriousness,” said McFarlane.
“They may well involve findings, albeit on the civil standard, of behavior which is contrary to the criminal law of England and Wales, international law, international maritime law, and internationally accepted human rights norms.”
McFarlane said the sheikh had denied all the allegations, but said of his account relating to Shamsa and Latifa that “he has not been open and honest with the court”.
“I have found that he continues to maintain a regime whereby both of these two young women are deprived of their liberty, albeit within family accommodation in Dubai,” he said.
The sheikh married Haya, believed to be his sixth wife, in 2004. McFarlane said in his judgment that at some stage in 2017 or 2018, she had an affair with one her bodyguards and her relationship with her husband had deteriorated by early 2019 when she left Dubai.
Mohammed’s lawyer told the court Haya had closed the children’s bank accounts and withdrawn about $32 million before arriving in Britain.
FRIENDS OF UK ROYALS
Haya and Mohammed are both on friendly terms with members of the British royal family and in the past the sheikh, one of the founders of the Godolphin horse racing stable, has been pictured with Queen Elizabeth at Britain’s Royal Ascot horse races.
Haya, who shares his love of horses and competed in equestrian jumping in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, was schooled in Britain and is now living with their children in the couple’s luxury mansion near Kensington Palace in west London.
McFarlane said the case had been unique.
Outside the austere wood-pannelled courtroom of the Royal Courts of Justice, four or five bodyguards wearing earpieces patrolled, with only lawyers and a small number of journalists, including Reuters, allowed to be present.
The lawyers’ benches were filled with some of Britain’s most senior legal operators including David Pannick, who successfully represented anti-Brexit campaigners in two high-profile court victories over the government and was drafted in by Mohammed to lead his team during the case.
Haya herself attended all the hearings, accompanied by her legal team which included Fiona Shackleton who represented British heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles in his divorce from his late first wife Princess Diana.
Giving evidence in person last November, she told McFarlane she feared the sheikh would abduct her two children, take them back to the Gulf Arab state and she would never see them again.
“I have seen what has happened to their sisters and I can’t face the fact that the same might happen to them,” she said.
