A dramatic escape, an affair with a bodyguard and a £5.2m battle royal.
The sheikh now has to suffer details being made public of his young wife’s extramarital affair with her British bodyguard, former infantry soldier Russell Flowers (circled).
Russell Flowers at Royal Ascot in June 2018.
It was Haya’s discovering the truth about her husband’s ‘torture’ of his two older daughters, Shamsa (pictured) and Latifa, that split them apart.
Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, and Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, June 16, 2016 in Ascot.
The sheikh and Haya had long been a fixture in British high society and are independently both friends of Queen Elizabeth II. Pictured: The sheikh and Haya at Ascot in 2012.
Her husband – who once told her ‘nothing happens here if I don’t know or command it’ – did not welcome her interest in the princesses, she said. Twice she found a gun on her bed which she took as a death threat.
In early February last year, there was a chilling telephone conversation with the sheikh in which he cruelly suggested Zayed was ‘a desert boy – in a few months we will take him from you, you will see’.
Then in March, he told his youngest children: ‘We don’t need your mum any more, do we?’ The children replied: ‘Yes we do’, the court ruling revealed. Sheikh Maktoum responded: ‘No, we don’t need her’.
On March 11, a helicopter landed on Haya’s lawn, and one of the security guards told Zayed: ‘Bubba is angry with Momma. He is going to send her to the jail’. The princess said her young son clung to her leg with terror. It was a ‘warning’, the court heard.
How British-schooled Olympic horsewoman Haya bint al-Hussein took on her potentate husband Sheikh al-Maktoum after fleeing to the UK.
Haya bint al-Hussein was third princess to flee one of the world’s richest families
Oxford-educated Princess Haya, 45, is only one to have successfully escaped.
Princess Haya, 45, is daughter of Jordan’s late king and is Sheikh al-Maktoum youngest wife.
She had affair with her British bodyguard, former infantry soldier Russell Flowers.
Princess Haya of Jordan. The sheikh and Haya had long been a fixture in British high society and are independently both friends of Queen Elizabeth II.
It was a cloudless evening in April last year when a luxury private jet glided in to land at Farnborough airport near London.
Her Royal Highness Haya bint al-Hussein stepped off the opulently-appointed Boeing 737 – and became the third princess to flee one of the world’s richest and most powerful families.
And so far Princess Haya, the glamorous 45-year-old Oxford-educated youngest wife of the ruler of Dubai, is the only one to have successfully escaped.
Disembarking into the crisp British air after the seven-hour flight from Dubai, she kept her two young children close.
By car, they were whisked into central London where, shortly before midnight, they swept through the black iron gates of an £85million mansion in central London which she had bought in February 2018 without her husband.
The daughter of Jordan’s late King Hussein, Princess Haya was quite unlike any of Sheikh al-Maktoum’s five other wives.
Her mother, Queen Alia of Jordan, died in a helicopter crash when she was two, and she was sent to England to board at £30,000-a-year Bryanston School.
She went up to Oxford to study philosophy, politics and economics at St Hilda’s College, where she met ‘open-minded people who were prepared to debate anything’.
The princess competed in showjumping at the 2000 Olympics for her country and has been a goodwill ambassador for the UN world food programme.
She also had a fun side, confessing to a penchant for ‘raunchy’ Jilly Cooper novels and mixing a love of Chanel with high street clothes.
Last year the sheikh – unaware his wife was fleeing him in fear of her life – had been waiting for her and their children at his sprawling estate in Newmarket, Suffolk, one of several enormous homes the 70-year-old monarch owns in the UK. They never turned up.
The sheikh and Haya had long been a fixture in British high society and are independently both friends of the Queen.
His Godolphin stables at Newmarket are one of the world’s most successful racing organisations, and she is a racehorse owner in her own right.
It was only hours before the sheikh twigged that his young wife – once the ‘liberal face of the monarchy’ in Dubai but who had drifted into an affair with her British bodyguard – had left him.
Worse, from his perspective, she had taken their daughter Princess Jalila, then 11, and son Prince Zayed, then seven.
[News script from Mail Online, by Sam Greenhill]
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