Princess Latifa biography: 10 things about Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum’s daughter

Sheikha Latifa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is an Emirati sheikha and a member of the ruling family of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Here are 10 more things about her:

1. She is the younger sister of Sheikha Maitha bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and Sheikha Shamsa bint Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum and one of the older sisters of Sheikh Majid bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. Their father Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum became the vice president of the UAE on January 5, 2006 and the prime minister of the country on February 11, 2006. Their mother Huriah Ahmed al M’aash is from Algeria.
2. She is internationally known as Princess Latifa. She has two half-sisters with the same name.
3. She attended the Dubai English Speaking School, the International School of Choueifat and the Latifa School for Girls.
4. Coached by former world champion skydiver Stefania Martinengo, she is an experienced skydiver who has held accelerated freefall instructor rating
5. She was 32 years old when she escaped from Dubai on February 24, 2018 with her Finnish friend Tiina Jauhiainen. They left Dubai in a car, crossed the border to Oman, left Oman on jet skis and joined American–French citizen Hervé Jaubert and his crew of three citizens of the Philippines on Nostromo, a yacht registered in the United States. Jaubert successfully escaped from the UAE in 2010.
6. On February 26, 2018, she contacted Detained International’s David Haigh, a lawyer based in the United Kingdom and informed him that she had escaped from Dubai.
7. On March 4, 2018, she was on Nostromo with Jauhiainen, Jaubert and his crew. While approaching Goa, India, they were intercepted by Indian authorities.
8. On March 8, 2018, a joint India–UAE operation forcibly returned her from international waters near the Indian coast to Dubai.
9. In December 2018, the Dubai royal court confirmed that she was back in Dubai, a claim supported by former United Nations high commissioner for human rights and seventh Ireland president Mary Robinson. Photographs of her alongside Robinson said to be taken on December 15, 2018 were released on December 24, 2018 by UAE authorities.
10. While in captivity in 2019, she wrote a letter asking the British authorities to reinvestigate the case of her sister Princess Shamsa, who escaped from their father’s Longcross Estate in Surrey, England, UK in June 2000 but was forcibly taken from Cambridge, England to Dubai in August 2000. She dated the handwritten letter February 2018 to avoid revealing that she had a way of communicating with the outside world from captivity. Her friends passed the letter to the police in Cambridgeshire, England on February 24, 2021. In the letter, she wrote that Princess Shamsa was “kept incommunicado with no release date, trial or charge” and “tortured by getting her feet caned.”