LONDON, U.K. -- An Indian army commando unit, a smuggled phone, a wealthy Middle Eastern sheik who shares a love of horses with Queen Elizabeth, and locked away in a prison villa, a young princess who dared to challenge her father’s authority.

The story of modern Dubai is the story of Sheik Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, who turned his spit of a desert Kingdom into a city of shiny, soaring architecture and daring commercial innovation. A man of enviable riches, grandiose vision and, say his detractors, harsh, unbending will.

His daughter Sheikha Latifa, one of 25 children, first tried to run away when she was 16, only to be captured at the border. Her sister Shamsa tried in 2000 while on a family holiday in the U.K. She was forcibly returned to Dubai and hasn’t been seen in public since.

Sheikha Latifa tried again in 2018, an elaborate operation planned and carried out in partnership with a French businessman and her best friend Tiina Jauhiainen, a martial arts instructor from Finland.

They made it to a yacht in the Indian Ocean before a team of Indian commandos stormed onto the deck, brutally ending their getaway, eight days after it began.

“The cabin started filling with smoke,” Jauhiainen told me from Oslo, “and we had to go upstairs to the upper deck where we were basically met with machine guns and laser sights pointing at us.”

In one of her videos, Sheikha Latifa described struggling with the soldiers.

“I had one Indian commando sitting on my stomach like straddling me and another one behind them trying to tie my legs, and the one who was sitting on my stomach grabbed my chest and he says to me, ‘Shut up, shut up.’ So I got really, really angry. And I was hitting him with my hands and screaming at him to get off me.”

And then, she vanished, hauled off the yacht, kicking, screaming and biting at her captors.

When Sheik Mohammed later spoke about his daughter, he said she was safe and happy with her family.

In fact, we now know she has spent the last three years locked away in a heavily guarded Dubai villa. Friends managed to smuggle in a phone, which she used to send a series of secret video messages describing her captivity.

“All the windows are barred shut. I can't open any window. There's five policemen outside and two police women inside the house.”

“I’m doing this video from a bathroom, because this is the only room with a door I can lock. I’m a hostage.”

One of her supporters is David Haigh, a British human rights lawyer.

“It was very dangerous for the team to use a phone when you have that many police guarding her. So we made plans for what we would do, and when, in the event that we lost contact.”

They lost contact towards the end of 2020.

“We asked Latifa to send us as much evidence as possible,” Jauhiainen said, “because we were thinking that maybe one day we might be needing it. And now the time has arrived.”

Marcus Essabri is Sheikha Latifa's first cousin. He lives in the U.K. and last spoke to her about nine months ago.

“We fear that the phone was discovered and we don't know what the consequences are going to be…she was in a very bad situation, but this makes it even worse.”

Latifa’s video messages are full of tension and defiance, but also despair.

“I don’t know what they’re planning on doing with me. The situation is getting more desperate every day.”

Her supporters are gratified by the response to the videos. At least her story is again before the world. The UN says it will question Sheik Mohammed, and British politicians have spoken out on her behalf.

“We want the international community and world leaders to stop looking at Sheik Mohammed as a friend,” Haigh said, “until such time that he actually starts to obey the laws and stops kidnapping and holding his daughters hostage.”

“We’re waiting for her,” said Sheikha Latifa’s cousin Essabri.

“We need to see her and touch her in the flesh and make sure that she's safe with her family here.”