They locked the door,
but the coast guardthrew a stun grenade.Their cabin beganfilling with smoke.opened an investigation into whether she had been taken out
of the country “against her will.” But the investigation appar-
ently languished, and Shamsa remained in Dubai, though she
has not appeared in a photograph circulating on the internet
or elsewhere in the intervening 18 years.
This was curious on its own, but not as strange as the case
of Shamsa’s younger sister Latifa. Known as a daredevil for
her expert skydiving, Latifa even appeared on the cover of
the local newspaper, says Jim Krane, a research fellow at Rice
University’s Baker Institute and author of City of Gold, a fasci-
nating contemporary history of Dubai. “Latifa was portrayed
as an über-princess who, like her brothers and dad, had taken
on the world, doing risky things like skydiving and enjoying
life,” says Krane.
In the sheik’s royal family, extreme sports were not only
accepted but considered a virtue. Behind the scenes, however,
Latifa claimed to have a terrible relationship with her mother
and barely any relationship with Sheik Mohammed, accord-
ing to Tiina Jauhiainen, a Finnish woman who was Latifa’s
personal capoeira instructor—and who, bizarrely, became
part of Latifa’s escape plan. Latifa would later speak bitterly of
how she was simply one of the three daughters that the sheik
named Latifa, which he’s explained means “friendly, kind,
and supportive” in Arabic—and was his mother’s name too.
“My mother was unique, tranquil, and gentle,” he wrote in one
of his books. “My mother loved all her children deeply, but I
always felt I was closest to her heart.... She ate only after we
ate. She rested only after we were asleep, and she rejoiced only
after our grief had dissipated.”
Yet this skydiving daughter, this Latifa, would be someone
quite different.A
T THE HIGHEST level of Arab royalty, men often house
their wives in different palaces, and this is thought to
be the case with Sheik Mohammed, says Jauhiainen.
“Mohammed has so many official wives and unofficial wives—
all these families are separate and barely know each other,” she
says. “The wives and daughters might meet at public events
like weddings, where the women’s wedding is separate from
the men’s. How they know each other is very much based on
their social media profiles: ‘Oh, this person has a better life, this
person gets to travel.’ ”
At Latifa’s family’s palace, Filipino maids satisfied her every
care, says Jauhiainen. Latifa’s family even had their own lei-
sure center with a pool, yoga room, and rooms for hairdressers
and manicurists. But Latifa wanted little to do with the five-
star lifestyle: She spent most of her time at the family’s stables,
caring for horses and her pet monkey. She became a vegan,cooking her own curries, and said she liked animals more than
humans, according to Jauhiainen.
She was also plotting something dramatic. Claiming that
Shamsa had been kept under house arrest and drugged after
her escape, and that Latifa herself had also been imprisoned
in solitary confinement and beaten when she tried to escape
to Oman and stick up for Shamsa, Latifa announced her own
departure from the country.
It was a quest that was many years in the making and
involved a cast of unexpected characters, including not only
Jauhiainen but French former spy Hervé Jaubert, who has
said he was employed in Dubai making submarines before he
was accused of embezzlement—a charge he denies. Years ear-
lier, Latifa read Jaubert’s book Escape From Dubai, in which he
wrote about Sheik Mohammed with disdain—even comment-
ing on the time the sheik was caught doping horses in a race
and suspended from the sport. “...After his ban is expired, it is
unlikely that Sheik Mohammed will ever run in another horse
race again if he can’t have this public arena to further inflate his
ego,” wrote Jaubert with a poison pen.
In his book, Jaubert was also highly sympathetic to women
in Dubai, declaring, “Emirati women are tired of being mar-
ried to their cousins, traded for camels, and being treated
like chattel.” He explained that for his own departure from
the country, he camouflaged himself as a woman, “dressed
in black from head to toe with an abaya—veil, ponytail, per-
fume and all.” He did this for one express reason: “This was
the best way to go around Dubai without being questioned or
even addressed by another person. It was like being invisible.”
Jaubert’s book must have been heady reading for Latifa.
And after surreptitiously corresponding with Jaubert for sev-
eral years, on February 24, 2018, according to Jauhiainen, she
and Latifa had a royal driver drop them off at a café where
they often met for breakfast. In the bathroom, Latifa took off
her black abaya, applied makeup, and put on tinted sunglass-
es. She also dropped her cell phone into a garbage can.
Then, Jauhiainen says, the two of them drove to the Omani
border, where they met Jaubert, who would pilot the yacht,
and one of his crew, who brought along Jet Skis. They rode
the skis about 15 miles out to the boat. “It was very rough
sea, in the middle of the ocean—just the craziest day ever,”
says Jauhiainen. They planned to go to Sri Lanka, and after
that, the United States. Latifa had thought about heading for
the United Kingdom but was worried that her father’s con-
nections would make it hard for the country to allow her to
remain, Jauhiainen says.
This motley crew sailed for eight days, eating granola bars
after finding the galley overrun with roaches. Nervously,
via a slow-moving internet connection, they tried to get in
touch with Western journalists who might spread word that
they needed protection. They thought the satellite connec-
tion they were using, which came from the U.S., wouldn’t be
penetrated. But about 30 miles off the coast of Goa, India,
with Jauhiainen and Latifa below deck in their bunk, they
heard gunshots. They locked the door, but the Indian coast
guard threw a stun grenade. Their cabin began filling with
smoke. The friends made it up the stairs to the deck, stagger-
ing from coughing so hard. Upstairs, the sky was black except
for the tiny red laser dots of the guns that Indian men were
pointing at them.