Where is Shamsa Al Maktoum from Dubai?
Sheikh’s daughter escaped family’s UK home before ‘kidnap’
The teenage daughter of the billionaire Crown Prince of Dubai dodged security guards and fled from her father’s vast private estate in Surrey in a Range Rover, her friends have told the Guardian.
Sheikha Shamsa al-Maktoum ran away, they say, a few weeks before she claims she was kidnapped by members of her father Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum’s staff and returned to Dubai.
In a growing controversy over the alleged kidnap of Shamsa, who was 19 at the time, ministers revealed yesterday that her father, who in effect runs the oil-rich Gulf state, tried to intervene with the British government over the ongoing police investigation into the allegations. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/dec/15/jamiewilson.stuartmillar
Unruly daughter of wealthy sheikh made a bid for freedom. But what happened next?
It was the black Range Rover that started the panic, according to Sheikha Shamsa al-Maktoum’s friends. Abandoned near a stable block at her father’s sprawling Surrey estate, they say, its discovery one morning in mid-July last year confirmed the security staff’s worst fears: Shamsa had run away.
Shamsa’s former riding instructor and other insiders have told the Guardian how the unruly 19-year-old’s disappearance sparked chaos on the Longcross estate near Chobham in Surrey where her father, Sheikh Mohammed al-Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, installed his family every summer.
To undermine the vast security operation which her father had placed around his children apparently to protect them from kidnap attempts — highly trained close protection officers, perimeter guards, video surveillance and rigorously enforced security drills — Shamsa simply drove the Range Rover to a corner of the estate, dumped it and slipped through an open gate on to Chobham Common, friends say. https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/dec/15/jamiewilson.stuartmillar1
