BBC has released a new video of Princess Latifa bint Mohammed al Maktoum, one of the daughters of the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates and Emir of Dubai Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum: since 2018, the year in which the tried to escape from Dubai, there was practically no news from him. In the video Latifa says she is being held hostage in a villa she cannot get out of. The video is a montage of several recordings sent by the princess to some friends over several months; BBC he says that his friends have not been receiving messages from Latifa for a long time.
In 2019, Latifa began to send secret messages to her friends, via a smuggled phone
She described being held, against her will
The UAE has previously said Latifa is “safe in the loving care of her family”#MissingPrincesshttps://t.co/WCWIJKcqLd pic.twitter.com/ngyi4nbnTO
— BBC Breaking News (@BBCBreaking) February 16, 2021
In other videos that reporters from BBC they could see the princess tells of when, after her escape, soldiers under her father’s orders brought her back to Dubai and drugged her. In the montage released by BBC instead it says:
I’m making this video from a bathroom because it’s the only room with a door that I can lock. I can’t lock my room door because he doesn’t have a key.
I am in a villa. I am being held hostage and this mansion has been turned into a prison. All the windows have bars and I can’t open any windows. There are five police officers outside, and two female police officers inside the house. I can’t even go out to get some air.
I don’t know when I will be released and what will happen to me when I am released. Every day I worry about my safety and my life. I don’t know if I will be able to survive in this situation. The police threatened me saying that I will be imprisoned for life and I will never see the sun again.
Everything tires me now. It’s like a circus. I don’t want to be a hostage in this prison villa, I just want to be free. I don’t know what they want to do to me. Really, I do not know. The situation is more desperate day by day and I am really tired of all this.
The video messages were given by the princess’s friends a BBC in the hope that they can lead to his release. The last time international newspapers had mentioned her was about a year ago, when the UK High Court of Justice he had judged Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum guilty of kidnapping two of his daughters – one of the two is Latifa – and of having conducted an intimidation campaign against his ex-wife, the Jordanian princess Haya Bint al-Hussein. In the summer of 2019, Princess Haya, the sixth wife of the sheikh, fled to London with two children aged 11 and 7, and the sheik had appealed to the British High Court of Justice to obtain custody of the children.
– Read also: The story of Princess Latifa, who tried to escape from Dubai
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