A four-metre barbed-wire fence runs through the desert at the UAE-Omani border. In the early hours of 17 February 2021, Albert Douglas, 58, a British businessman, was creeping along it, looking for a way through. Douglas, who cuts a slight figure, wears spectacles and has a broad, earnest smile, never expected things to come to this. He'd been forced to abandon his home on Dubai’s Palm Jumeirah, the tree-shaped archipelago lined with upmarket residences, and go into hiding. Usually he'd be driving around in a Rolls-Royce, now he was in a pickup truck, being chauffeured by people smugglers. They'd transported him to the edge of the Al Ain border, which neighbours Oman, in the dead of the night. It was incredible, really, how fast the life he once led could evaporate. All that mattered now was getting to the other side of that fence.
A few weeks earlier, Douglas had been sitting at home, watching his supreme court appeal via video link. He was being hounded by the Dubai authorities over debts incurred by his son Wolfgang Douglas’s company and, while Wolfgang was in the UK, Albert had been arrested. Albert was facing a £2.5m fine and a three-year prison sentence – this was his final chance for a reprieve. He had always believed the truth would prevail, but as he watched the hearing play out, his faith in the system deserted him. He decided to lie low in a friend’s apartment while he weighed his options. It soon became clear that he didn’t have any. “That’s when I decided to leave,” he says. “I left it not to the last minute, but the last second.”
The escape plan was activated. Soon, Albert was making his way to the border, switching cars along the way. They pitched up in a nearby village to await nightfall. As he approached the fence, trying to locate a hole that had been cut in advance, all seemed to be going smoothly. Then the calm of the desert was broken by shouts and gunshots. Red dots peppered Albert’s body – laser sights from the weapons of UAE soldiers closing in on him. Wolfgang, who was following the situation from his home in Kensington, London, was dialled into the phone of one of the people smugglers on the other side of the fence. Now gunshots crackled down the line. Before he could find out what was happening, the phone went dead. Out in the desert, soldiers surrounded Albert. He begged them not to shoot. A hood was pulled over his head.
Albert doesn’t know where he was taken (his family believes it was a military base), but he found himself in a dark, dirty cell. He says he was stripped, slapped, deprived of sleep and interrogated over several days. He was asked repeatedly for details about the smugglers. “I wasn’t withholding information,” he says. “I didn’t have the answer. So I was beaten and I was tortured.” Albert was then taken to Al Ain central prison in Abu Dhabi. While he was being held there, three guards entered his cell. By the time they left, he was unconscious. His head had been “kicked around like a football”; his shoulder badly broken. Albert, who still wakes up screaming about the experience, recalls a state of total shock. “You just assume it’s going to stop,” he says. “It doesn’t stop, but you just think it’s gonna stop, and, basically, thereon after, you think you’re gonna die.”
In London, Wolfgang was spiralling. With no means of getting hold of Albert directly, he activated his contacts in the UAE to look for him. His first thought was that the gunshots came from the smugglers, not soldiers. He had heard about people getting killed and dumped in ditches along the border, and organised a search along the line to look for a body. They called the hospitals, even the police, but nothing. Days passed, a week. While Wolfgang frantically searched, Albert was being held in solitary confinement. About 10 days had passed when Wolfgang received a phone call from an unknown UAE number. “Son,” Albert’s voice came through the earpiece, the sound of shouts and screams echoing in the background, “I am not OK.”
Dubai has always been a place you escape to, or escape from. The competing visions of the city – the one beamed out on social media, and its complex reality – have never been more pronounced than in recent weeks, its pristine veneer
