Feb 2021. The Missing Princesses

Princess Latifa is the the 33-year-old daughter of the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. In February 2018 she boarded a boat and set sail for India with a plan to start a new life in America. But within days her boat was stormed by Indian commandos - she was captured and presumably returned to Dubai. No one has heard from her since. Before her capture Princess Latifa made a video in case she was caught, and entrusted it to a lawyer in America. Days later it was released on You Tube. Far from living a charmed life, she was watched and restricted by her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The princess claims she had been imprisoned and tortured for a previous attempt to leave. There’s the mystery of her older sister, Shamsa, who disappeared from the streets of Cambridge in 2000 after fleeing the family’s British mansion in Surrey. Is the image of Dubai we are sold - of winter sunshine and luxury hotels - actually hiding a brutal dictatorship of human rights abuses, where surveillance, imprisonment and torture are systematic and where tourists can easily be imprisoned for the slightest infringements of the state's ultra conservative laws?