For more than half her life, Latifa had been devising plans to flee her father, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the leader of Dubai and the Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Mohammed is an ally of Western governments, celebrated for transforming Dubai into a modern power. Publicly, he has placed gender equality at the heart of his plan to propel the U.A.E. to the top of the world economic order, vowing to “remove all the hurdles that women face.” But for his daughter Dubai was “an open air prison,” where disobedience was brutally punished.

In her teens, Latifa had been ferociously beaten for defying her father. As an adult, she was forbidden to leave Dubai and kept under the constant surveillance of guards. Escape presented a challenge of “unfathomable immensity,” Latifa knew. “It will be the best or last thing I do,” she wrote. “I have never known true freedom. For me, it’s something worth dying for.” (I have drawn details of Latifa’s experience from hundreds of letters, e-mails, texts, and audio messages that she sent to friends in the course of a decade.) …

The darkness was sliced in all directions by the laser sights of assault rifles. Masked men seized the women and forced them up to the deck, where the captain and his crew lay bound and beaten. The floor was pooled with blood. Latifa’s hands were tied behind her back and she was thrown down, but she resisted: kicking, screaming, and clinging to the gunwales. As the men dragged her away, Jauhiainen heard her cry out, “Shoot me here! Don’t take me back.” Then the princess vanished overboard.

[This is a very long article, but well worth the read. The story of Latifa and her sister Shamsa occasionally pops up in news reports, but nothing like the depth here. — Ed]