PHOTOGRAPHY BY PETER VAN DEN BERG/AUSTRALSCOPE; INSTAGRAM/WANDERINGFINN; ALAMY. ILLUSTRATION BY GREEDY HEN/THE JACKY WINTER GROUP.house. She had curfews. She was treated like a
child. She used to get depressed if she had to spend
a day at home. She didn’t even call her home a home.
She called it a house and hated it.
“If it was a member of British royalty, something
would have happened,” adds Tiina. “But because it
was in the Gulf, no-one cares. I’m back now, and I’m
asking people to listen.”T
iina grew up in Finland and had been
living in Dubai since 2001, having moved
there after graduating from London South
Bank University. She met Latifa in 2010,
when the princess hired her for private
Brazilian dance lessons. “I saw her on a daily basis
from then on,” Tiina says. “Because she’s not allowed to
work or study, when she starts a new hobby it becomes
her purpose for getting up in the morning.” In 2013,
the friends learnt to skydive together. “That used to
give her a great sense of freedom. By the end,
she’d done around 2500 jumps.”
As the women grew closer, Latifa began to open
up more about her life, revealing that her seemingly
pampered world was really a prison. In 2016, she told
Tiina that her older sister, Shamsa, had tried to escape
her family while on holiday at their Surrey estate in- She had been seized on the streets of
Cambridge in an apparent abduction that was never
fully investigated by the police. Latifa
claimed her sister spent the next eight
years imprisoned and was drugged by
her family. That was the last time either
of the sisters went abroad. Shamsa has
not been seen in public since.
In 2002, when Latifa was 16, she
tried to escape by driving to Oman. But
she was caught at the border, she told Tiina, before
being imprisoned for three-and-a-half years, during
which time she claimed she was tortured. According to
her own account, she was thrown into a windowless
cell with a dirty mattress, beaten and threatened with
death. Two former members of staff to UAE royals
have confirmed that her case was strikingly similar
to several others they had seen. “One guy was holding
me and the other guy was beating me,” Latifa
has said. “They told me, ‘Your father told us
to beat you until we kill you.’”
When Latifa asked her friend to help her escape,
Tiina says she “didn’t hesitate”. “She had been the
most amazing friend to me and she didn’t deserve any
of this. She was hoping to seek asylum
in the US, and then try to find work. She
told me, ‘I’m a qualified skydiving
instructor. But I’m happy to flip burgers
as long as I’m not here.’”
After nine months of planning,
Latifa and Tiina left Dubai on
February 24, 2018. They went to a cafe for
breakfast (one they had been visiting for weeks to
avoid raising suspicions) where Latifa left her phone,
so it couldn’t be traced, and took off her full-length
abaya robe. They drove to Oman – “It was Latifa’s first
time sitting in the front of a car, so we took selfies,”
says Tiina – and from there took a dinghy 25km off
the coast of the capital, Muscat. There, they were met
by a French former naval officer, Hervé Jaubert,
who they had enlisted to help with the escape. He
took them another 24km on jet skis to the yacht,
where his Filipino crew were waiting.
“The whole day was crazy,” says Tiina. “We were
both full of adrenaline and the sea had been rough,
with two-metre waves, so we kept falling off the jet
skis. When we made it to the boat, we were so relieved
that part of the journey was done. But, of course,
during the next couple of days on the boat, Latifa
became increasingly worried about what was happen-
ing, knowing what her father was capable of.”
Eight days later, the boat was boarded by Indian
coastguards. Latifa and Tiina were in their cabin
when they heard screaming and shots. “We locked
ourselves in the bathroom and hugged each
other. Latifa kept saying, ‘Oh God, they’ve found me,
they’ve come to get me.’ It was terrifying. Then the
cabin started to fill with smoke.”
They were forced to go outside, holding hands,
and were met on the upper deck with guns pointed at
them. “It was unreal, like something from the movies,”“HER LAST
WORDS WERE,
‘DON’T TAKE
ME BACK, JUST
SHOOT ME HERE’”CLOCKWISE FROM
ABOVE Princess Latifa
has a soft spot for
animals; the experienced
skydiver after a jump;
and Tiina, who won’t
rest until Latifa is free.WORLD REPORT