England: Dubai’s ruler kidnapped daughters, High Court finds

Sir Andrew McFarlane said that, on the civil standard, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum’s actions could have broken English and international law.

The judgment, published yesterday, found that the officer investigating the abduction of Princess Shamsa from Cambridge in 2000, when she was 19, was stopped from travelling to Dubai to undertake criminal inquiries.

DCI David Beck of Cambridgeshire police was refused permission to speak to “potential witnesses” in the Gulf after making a formal request to the Crown Prosecution Service, according to the ruling. The Foreign Office refused to give the court its files on the case.

Claims about Sheikh Mohammed were revealed after the Supreme Court lifted a secrecy order over details of the custody battle for the two children.

He had attempted to keep the judgment private but his appeal was rejected and he was found to have “not been open and honest with the court”.

In a statement, Sheikh Mohammed said: “As a head of government, I was not able to participate in the court’s fact-finding process. This has resulted in the release of a ‘fact-finding’ judgment which inevitably only tells one side of the story.”

Sheikh Mohammed has 25 children and is both prime minister and vice-president of the United Arab Emirates. He owns a 63,000-acre estate in the Highlands.