28 JUN 2023 · Heidi Blake is a writer for The New Yorker. Her latest article is The Fugitive Princesses of Dubai. “I definitely feel as an investigative reporter that I feel very driven by my own capacity for shock and outrage and genuinely feeling like this is unbelievable. And that kind of makes me want to keep digging. And once I stop feeling that on any given topic, I lose interest. And so I’ve always been a generalist, and I just kind of rove from one topic to the next. I’m always finding myself in new territory where I know absolutely nothing about the thing I’m starting to dig into and have to try and play catch up and get my head around something new.” -Heidi Blake

20 APR 2023 · Princess Haya flees to London and ignites a bitter custody battle with Sheikh Mohammed. The court hearings put the spotlight back on Sheikha Latifa and Sheikha Shamsa’s abductions. But which of these women will end up free? https://www.campsidemedia.com/infamous | A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production.

13 APR 2023 · Public outrage over Sheikha Latifa’s disappearance prompts Princess Haya, Sheikh Mohammed’s wife and Jordanian royalty, to get involved. But Haya has secrets herself, and before long, her own relationship with Sheikh Mohammed takes a dark turn. https://www.campsidemedia.com/infamous | A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production.

6 APR 2023 · Sheikha Latifa, one of Sheikh Mohammed’s daughters and Shamsa’s sister, escapes on a yacht with the help of her capoeira instructor and an alleged former French spy. When their boat is suddenly ambushed by Indian Special Forces, Latifa’s bid for freedom seems dashed. But she’s recorded a video that could change everything. https://www.campsidemedia.com/infamous | A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production.

30 MAR 2023 · Sheikh Mohammed is the massively wealthy, seemingly-progressive ruler of Dubai, a glittering tourist destination on the Persian Gulf. But when his daughter, Sheikha Shamsa, runs away from his British estate, it seems that all that glitters is not gold. https://www.campsidemedia.com/infamous | A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production.

12 JUN 2022 · Stacie and Alicia of the Trashy Divorces podcast discuss Princess Haya's escape from Dubai. Stacie has the gobsmacking escape of Princess Haya of Jordan, whose decade and a half of marriage to Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, was heading south by the time he became embroiled in yet another scandal for kidnapping one of his 26 children. Again. Source: https://www.trashydivorces.com/2022/06/12/s14e10-runaway-princess-hayas-escape-from-dubai-elisabeth-moss-and-fred-armisen/

3 NOV 2021 · The abduction of a young woman from the streets of Cambridge is the origin-story of how Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai treats the women in his life. The reputation of Sheikh Mohammed of Dubai has been tarnished beyond repair by the way he treated his wife Haya and daughter Latifa. At least we know about what they went through. There's another daughter - Shamsa - who was the first to try to escape the Sheikh's clutches. She, and her story, have almost vanished. The High Court recently found that Sheikh Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai, had deployed the full force of the state he runs to coerce and intimidate his ex-wife, all because she had dared to defy him and flee the UAE with her two young children. The ruling revealed just how ruthless the Sheikh could be – and revealed a pattern. Because, as part of the court battle, two previous cases were combed over: those of Princess Latifa and Princess Shamsa, two of the Sheikh’s daughters who have also tried to escape his control. Latifa’s story is well-known, in part because of her genius at publicising it. But Shamsa has been forgotten, a woman whose alleged abduction from a Cambridge street and subsequent imprisonment in Dubai has been conveniently forgotten over the last 21 years by the British authorities, as Sheikh Mohammed has been embraced by the Royals, and his billions in investment welcomed. Source: https://www.tortoisemedia.com/audio/shamsa-the-forgotten-princess/

11 OCT 2021 · A high court judge has ruled that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum hacked the phone of his ex-wife Princess Haya using Pegasus spyware. In this episode we look at the implications of the affair. Earlier this year we brought you an investigation into the use of controversial spyware called Pegasus. As part of that series we revealed that the phone number of Princess Haya, the ex-wife of the ruler of Dubai, had https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2021/jul/22/today-in-focus-the-pegasus-project-part-4-runaway-princesses-and-the-uk-connection-podcast. This software gives the user the ability to access photos, videos, phone calls – everything on the target’s mobile phone. Last week that story took a dramatic twist. The Guardian’s defence and security editor https://twitter.com/dansabbagh/ tells https://twitter.com/rachel_hump/ that new documents released in a UK court reveal rulings by a senior judge that confirmed that Haya was successfully hacked along with members of her legal and security teams. The judge also ruled that on the balance of probabilities, the hack was ordered by Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. It’s an act that has implications not just for Haya and her legal team, but for everyone in the UK. And the affair has posed questions too for the British government over its relationship with its close ally the United Arab Emirates.

21 JUL 2021 · Two princesses from the United Arab Emirates show up in our leaked records – and we look at whether powerful spyware is being used against UK citizens. In 2018, Princess Latifa, a daughter of Dubai’s ruler, made a bid for freedom. Together with a Finnish fitness instructor and a French former spy, she fled the United Arab Emirates. The Guardian’s https://twitter.com/dansabbagh/ tells https://twitter.com/safimichael/ that at the height of the escape drama, it can now be revealed, the mobile numbers for Latifa and some of her friends back home appeared on a database at the heart of the Pegasus project data investigation. Latifa was ultimately captured by Indian special forces and returned to Dubai. The UAE described it not as an escape attempt but as a kidnapping. The controversial incident was one of the final straws for Princess Haya, the sixth wife of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. She left the UAE after the couple divorced and soon became enmeshed in a protracted and acrimonious legal battle in the UK courts for custody of their children. As the Guardian’s https://twitter.com/davidtpegg/ reports, the phone numbers of Haya, and eight of her close associates, appear in a dataset believed to indicate people of interest to a government client of NSO. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/18/response-from-nso-and-governments it cannot see how its customers, which are all governments, use its military-grade spyware Pegasus, which is capable of secretly infecting a mobile phone and then extracting massive amounts of data from it. It says Pegasus is only supposed to be used to prevent terrorism and serious crime, and that its clients sign contracts agreeing to these terms when they purchase a licence. There were British numbers in the records, too. One of those was of the human rights lawyer Rodney Dixon QC, and we were able to check his phone. The results were not conclusive – there was no successful infection – but we did find suspicious activity. NSO says it wasn’t technically possible for this phone to have been targeted. But if people in London are finding possible signs of Pegasus activity on their phones, is being in the UK any protection? Source: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2021/jul/22/today-in-focus-the-pegasus-project-part-4-runaway-princesses-and-the-uk-connection-podcasthttps://www.theguardian.com/news/series/todayinfocus | https://www.theguardian.com/ | July 21, 2021

8 JUN 2021 · The story of Princess Latifa who has been missing since 2018 when she attempted to flee Dubai but was forcibly returned by her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Host https://twitter.com/KevDoyle_Indo/ examines what happened to the Princess and how former Irish president Mary Robinson became embroiled in the controversy. https://soundcloud.com/infocusindependent/sets/infocus-the-current-affairs, https://www.independent.ie/podcasts/ June 8, 2021