LONDON - A woman who says she was secretly married to Saudi Arabia’s late king Fahad won her claim for a multi-million pound payout from his son at London’s High Court on Tuesday.
Judge Peter Smith ruled that Janan Harb was entitled to more than £15 million ($23 million/21 million euros), plus the deeds to two plush London flats, thought to be worth £5 million each. He accepted that the absolute ruler’s son Prince Abdul Aziz bin Fahad had struck such an agreement with Harb, honouring the king’s promise that she would be looked after for the rest of her life.
Unless the prince decides to challenge the ruling in the higher Court of Appeal, he will have to pay up within 28 days. Born to a Christian Palestinian family, Harb, 68, is now a British national. She says she was secretly married to Fahad in 1968 when she was 19 and he was a prince and the interior minister.
Harb claimed Fahad, who became king in 1982 and died in 2005, had promised to provide for her financially for the rest of her life. She claimed Abdul Aziz told her in 2003 that he was prepared to honour his father’s promise, and had offered to give her £12 million plus the deeds to the two flats by the River Thames. She took legal action after claiming she had received neither the money nor the properties. “This has been 12 years of misery for me. I am very happy with British justice,” Harb said after the ruling.
- ‘Discreet ceremony’ -
During a seven-day hearing in July, Harb said Fahad’s family was against their relationship due to her Christian upbringing. “Fahad was concerned about how this would be viewed by the Saudi public, many of whom follow a strict interpretation of Islam that preaches deep enmity and hostility to all other religions,” she said.
“It was for this reason that in March 1968 we underwent a discreet ceremony of marriage.” Harb said she converted to Islam shortly before the wedding. She said she fell pregnant three times in the following three years but had abortions “because of his concern over the outcry” he might have faced. She said she was banished in 1970. She had two further marriages, which both ended in divorce. Little is known about King Fahad’s private life, but he was known to have had multiple wives. Moreover, Lebanese authorities charged a Saudi prince and nine others with drug trafficking, a week after they were caught in a record drug bust, a judicial source told AFP.
Saudi prince Abdel Mohsen Bin Walid Bin Abdulaziz and four others were detained by airport security on October 26 after nearly two tons of Captagon capsules and cocaine were found waiting to be loaded onto their private plane at Beirut airport. A public prosecutor “has charged 10 people, including five arrested individuals — a Saudi prince and Saudi nationals with smuggling and selling the drug Captagon,” the judicial source said.
Five individuals still at large were included in the charges, including three Lebanese and two Saudi nationals, the source added. Captagon is the brand name for the amphetamine phenethylline, a synthetic stimulant. The banned drug is consumed mainly in the Middle East and has reportedly been widely used by fighters in Syria. According to the judicial source, the case has been transferred to an investigative judge. The drug bust was “the largest one that has been foiled through the Beirut International Airport,” a security source told AFP.
last week on condition of anonymity. Saudi Arabia’s large royal family has had past run-ins with authorities in various countries. Authorities decided not to pursue the charge, citing a lack of evidence. In 2013, a Saudi princess was accused in Los Angeles of enslaving a Kenyan woman as a housemaid, but the charges were also eventually dropped.