August 2000
Princess Shamsa, then 19, is abducted from the streets of Cambridge, it is alleged by staff working for her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, and forced to return to the United Arab Emirates. The Guardian is the first to report in December 2001 that detectives are examining Shamsa’s kidnapping by agents of her father.
March 2018
Another daughter of the sheikh, Princess Latifa, then 32, is seized by Indian army commandos from the Indian Ocean as she attempts to flee the emirate, before being forcibly returned to Dubai. Before her attempted escape she had recorded a video in which she said her leaving was “the start of me claiming my life, my freedom”.
April 2019
The sheikh’s sixth and youngest wife, Princess Haya, flees to England with their two young children. Subsequently both sides become embroiled in legal proceedings in the family court in London, the sheikh attempting to return the children to Dubai while Haya applies for a forced-marriage protection order, relating to their daughter, and a non-molestation order.
December 2019
In a judgment, published in March last year, Sir Andrew McFarlane, the president of the family division of the high court, finds on the balance of probabilities that the sheikh orchestrated the abductions of Shamsa and Latifa and subjected Haya to a campaign of “intimidation”. The findings relating to Haya include that the sheikh attempted to have her abducted by helicopter, arranged for guns to be left in her bedroom, divorced her without telling her, threatened to seize their children and published threatening poems about her online.
December 2020
McFarlane, after hearing that the sheikh attempted to buy a £30m estate next door to Haya’s house in Berkshire, creates a 100-metre exclusion zone around her property and a 1,000ft no-fly zone above it to protect her from her ex-husband and his agents, saying: “The mother is justified in regarding the purchase of a substantial estate immediately abutting her own as being a very significant threat to her security.” Details of the decision were only published on Wednesday.
May 2021
In another judgment published on Wednesday, McFarlane finds on the balance of probabilities that the sheikh’s agents with his “express or implied authority” unlawfully hacked the phone of his ex-wife and five of her associates – including a British parliamentarian – using NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware. Finding that Haya was personally hacked 11 times, including on one occasion when 265MB of data was uploaded, equivalent to about 24 hours of digital voice recording data or 500 photographs, he calls it a “a total abuse of trust, and indeed an abuse of power”.
