The two princesses are reportedly brought back to their homes from abroad against their will. Latifa had earlier pleaded for help through leaked video messages. She said that she was being held in a villa by her father’s orders and feared for her life.

Latifa’s friends have also handed over a handwritten letter from 2019 to British authorities on Wednesday. In the text, the princess asks to pay attention to her sister’s fate. According to a British judge on her father’s side, she was kidnapped in the United Kingdom twenty years ago.

Freedom

“I ask all of you to please pay attention to this matter,” Princess Latifah wrote to the British authorities. “Then she could regain her independence.”

Princess Shamsa al-Maktoum spent part of her childhood in the United Kingdom. In 1999 she wrote to a cousin, frustrated that her father would not allow her to go to university. “He didn’t even ask me what I needed. He said no”, the princess said, according to the BBC. A year later she fled her family’s possessions in Surrey, England.

The zombie

The flight to Shamsa did not last long. Her father’s team found her in Cambridge in 2000. She is said to have flown to France by helicopter and then to Dubai by private jet. Latifa writes that her sister remained locked up there for eight years and was then roasted with bullets. “Which made him like a zombie.”

The British police also launched an investigation at that time, but nothing came of it. A detective was allowed to talk to Shamsa over the phone, but was later refused to go to Dubai for a follow-up investigation.