The popular American magazine Vanity Fair published a novel written by journalists Bradley Hope and Justin Chic, about how Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman kidnapped his "annoying" cousin, Sultan bin Turki II from Paris to Riyadh, only to disappear forever.
And in it, Captain Saud was sitting on a leather sofa in the cabin of the Boeing 737-800 in Paris, looking like a pilot. His demeanor was confident and friendly, as he made jokes and showed pictures of his children to the employees of one of the VIPs who was supposed to travel to Cairo, a Saudi prince named Sultan bin Turki II.
Saud's flight crew consisted of 19 people, more than twice the usual number. They were all men, not including the European blondes who usually participated in the Saudi royal court trips.
Don't get on this plane "It's a trap."
One of the security personnel of Prince Sultan warned his amir: "Don't get on this plane. It's a trap."
But Prince Sultan was tired, and he missed his father, who was waiting for him in Cairo. And Mohammed bin Salman, the king's son, had sent this plane. Sultan believed he could trust his powerful cousin.
Sultan bin Turki II - like Prince Muhammad - is the grandson of the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Sultan was born on the margins of the troubled family, and his father, Turki II (who was named the second because the founder had two sons named Turki), appeared to be a potential heir to the throne until he married the daughter of a Sufi leader, which many members of the royal family considered an insult to their conservative Islam, and they denied him to Cairo to move to a hotel. There he stayed for years.
Nevertheless, Sultan maintained relations with his powerful relatives in Saudi Arabia, and married his cousin Prince Abdullah, who became king, but she died in 1990 in a car accident, and Sultan - 22 years old - after that, lived a free life.
Generous grants to princes
With generous grants from his uncle, King Fahd, Sultan traveled around Europe with an entourage of security guards, fashion models and assistants, and was close to his uncle Fahd, when his uncle left a hospital in Geneva after eye surgery in 2002, Sultan was directly behind his wheelchair, which is a privileged position among the members of Royal family who are competing to draw close to the king.
Sultan did not have a governmental role, but he liked to be seen as an influential figure, and he would speak to foreign journalists about his views on Saudi politics, taking a more open stance than most princes, but he always supported the monarchy.
In January 2003, he drifted into a different path, telling reporters that Saudi Arabia should stop providing assistance to Lebanon, and alleged that Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri was corruptly using Saudi money to finance an extravagant lifestyle.
The first kidnapping
Sultan was not the first to accuse Prime Minister Rafik Hariri of corruption, and he criticized Lebanon rather than the kingdom.
However, the echo of his statement inside the royal court was very exciting, as the Hariri family had deep ties with the rulers of Saudi Arabia, especially King Fahd's powerful son Abdulaziz. Sultan’s statement seemed to be aimed at antagonizing Abdulaziz.
A few months later, Sultan faxed a statement to the Associated Press, stating that he had started a committee to root out corruption among Saudi princes and others who had "plundered the state's wealth over the past 25 years."
About a month later, Abdel Aziz sent an invitation to Sultan: "Come to the King Fahd Palace in Geneva. Let's settle our differences." In the meeting, Abdulaziz tried to persuade Sultan to return to the kingdom, and when he refused, the guards pounced on the prince, injected him with a sedative, and dragged him onto a plane bound for Riyadh.
Sultan weighed about 177 kilograms, and drugs or a traction in his limbs had damaged his diaphragm and legs nerves. He spent the next 11 years in and out of Saudi prisons, sometimes in a closed government hospital in Riyadh.
In 2014, Sultan contracted swine flu and the subsequent life-threatening complications. Assuming the prince, now nearly paralyzed, no longer posed a threat to anyone, the government allowed him to seek medical care in Massachusetts. Sultan considered that he was free.
During Sultan’s detention, major changes took place in the rule of Saudi Arabia: King Fahd died in 2005, and his successor, Abdullah, came, and he is less tolerant of flaunting the princely wealth. Abdullah reduced financial grants for princes.
He did not understand the transitions
But it seems that Sultan did not understand this shift nor the bigger one in early 2015, after he recovered from his severe health problems, when King Salman assumed the throne. Instead of withdrawing and settling for a lesser standard life, he performed liposuction and plastic surgery and returned to resume his luxurious life.
Sultan has reached out to security guards and old advisers, whom he has not spoken to since his abduction more than a decade ago. He reunited his entourage, and set off for Europe like a Saudi prince in the 1990s.
With armed guards, six full-time nurses, a doctor, rotating "girlfriends" hired by a Swiss modeling agency, and more, Sultan was spending millions of dollars a month. From Oslo to Berlin, Geneva and Paris, the pioneers of the modern luxury caravan were to eat only the finest food and drink only the best wines.
After a few days or weeks in the city, the Sultan ordered the servants to pack his bags and call the Saudi embassy to escort him to the airport in Paris.
lawsuit
The royal court continued to deposit funds into Sultan's bank account. But he realized that these payments would eventually stop, and he had no other income. So he devised a plan: Sultan decided that the Saudi government owed him compensation for his 2003 kidnapping injuries.
He appealed to Sultan Muhammad bin Salman. He did not know Muhammad well. He had been imprisoned since Muhammad was in his late teens, but he heard from his family that Muhammad had become the most powerful person in the royal court, and Muhammad demanded compensation for his injuries.
Muhammad was unwilling to pay someone who caused his own problems and often complained about his personal situation.
And in the summer of 2015, Sultan did something unprecedented: he filed a lawsuit in a Swiss court against members of the royal family for kidnapping.
They warned him about another kidnapping
His Saudi and foreign friends were alarmed, and warned him not to be kidnapped again. But Sultan was stubborn and insisted on filing the case. The Swiss criminal prosecutor has launched an investigation. Newspapers picked up the story. Sultan's payments from the royal court stopped abruptly.
Sultan's entourage did not realize the problem for weeks, until one day the prince asked for room service in his hotel in Sardinia and the restaurant refused to serve him.
It occurred to one of the caravan members to inform Sultan of the reason, and told him: "You are completely bankrupt."
The hotel nearly fired the prince, but was unable to write off $ 1 million or more in unpaid bills from the prince's weeks of stay. Sultan told his employees that he would persuade the royal court to return his payments. The hotel has reopened the credit line.
He tried to outwit bin Salman
Sultan took an adventure. He tried to outwit Mohammed bin Salman, and sent two anonymous messages to his uncles. He wrote that their brother King Salman was "incompetent" and "helpless", a puppet of Prince Muhammad. "It is no longer a secret that the most serious problem with his health is the mental aspect that made the king completely subject to his son Muhammad."
Sultan wrote that Muhammad was corrupt and had transferred more than $ 2 billion of government funds to his private account. He wrote that the only solution is for the brothers to remove the king and "hold an emergency meeting of the elders of the family to discuss the situation and take all necessary measures to save the country."
Sultan's letters were leaked to the British newspaper, The Guardian. Although it was not signed, officials of the royal court quickly identified its author.
Sultan was waiting for the results. Perhaps his uncles will try to restrain Muhammad. Or maybe Mohamed offers money to stop making trouble. Sultan concluded that he might enjoy a status similar to that of his father: he could live in well-funded isolation away from his powerful cousins.
Decoy
Amazingly, shortly after Sultan's letters were published, more than $ 2 million from the royal court appeared in Sultan's bank account. He paid the hotel and renewed his travel plans. Better yet, he received an invitation from his "father" to visit Cairo, hoping to mend their relationship. His "father" told him that, as a reward, the royal court would send a luxury plane to transport him and his accompanying delegation to Cairo. It seemed as if Mohammed bin Salman was trying to bring his lost cousin back into the fold.
Sultan's employees were dumbfounded. Some of them were present during the last time they criticized Sultan Hariri, and found himself on board a plane for the royal court that had kidnapped him and his convoy. How could a prince even think of getting on a plane?
But Sultan seemed eager to believe that reconciliation was afoot. Perhaps Mohammed bin Salman is a leader of a new kind who will not solve a family dispute by kidnapping.
The Royal Court sent a specially equipped 737-800 aircraft (with a capacity of 189 passengers for commercial use) and Sultan ordered his staff to meet the flight crew and find out the situation.
Why do you trust them?
The crew members looked more like security officials than flight attendants. One of his employees warned him, "This plane will not land in Cairo."
"You don't trust them?" Sultan asked. "Why do you trust them?" The employee replied. Sultan did not answer. But he hesitated until Captain Saud offered to ease his concerns by leaving 10 crew members in Paris, as a goodwill gesture to show that this was not a kidnapping. That was enough for the prince.
Sultan told his delegation to start packing the luggage. With servants, nurses, security guards and a "girlfriend" hired from a modeling agency, the entourage numbered more than a dozen.
To Riyadh instead of Cairo
The plane left Paris quietly, and its flight path to Cairo for two hours was visible on screens around the cabin. Then the screens flashed and turned off.
Sultan's employees were annoyed. "what happens?" Someone asked Captain Saud. He went back to explain that there was a technical problem, and the only engineer who could fix it was among the crew members left in Paris. No need to worry, Saud said.
By the time the plane began to descend, everyone on board realized it would not land in Cairo. There was no river creeping through the city under the plane, nor the pyramids of Giza, it was the unmistakable city of Riyadh.
By the time the kingdom's capital tower appeared, turmoil erupted, and Sultan's non-Saudi escorts demanded to know what would happen to them, and they landed in Saudi Arabia without visas and against their will. "Give me my rifle!" Prince Sultan shouted weak and panted, but he sat in silence until the plane landed. There was no way to fight, and Captain Saud's men pushed the Prince down the jet lane. It was the last time anyone in his entourage saw him.
Security guards eventually drove the courtiers to a hotel where they stayed for three days, unable to leave without visas.
Finally, on the fourth day, the guards brought the entourage to a sprawling conference room with a huge table in the middle that had Captain Saud headed. He told them, "I am Saud Al-Qahtani. I work for the royal court." He asked them to sign non-disclosure agreements, offer money to some, and return them to their countries.
The operation silenced an annoying critic and provided a lesson for any potential dissident in the royal family.
The context is completed by the Jabri court
Almost five years later, the full context of Prince Sultan's kidnapping became clearer in another court case.
Saad al-Jabri, the former Saudi intelligence chief who is currently living in exile in Canada, filed a lawsuit against Prince Mohammed in a US federal court about a month ago, alleging that the prince tried to kill him at the hands of a team called the "Tiger Squad".
The former intelligence chief claimed that the division's origins date back to 2015. The lawsuit says, "Prince Muhammad asked al-Jabri to deploy a Saudi counterterrorism unit in an extrajudicial retaliation operation against a Saudi prince living in Europe who criticized King Salman."
Al-Jabri claims in the lawsuit that he refused because the operation was "immoral and illegal" and offensive to Saudi Arabia. The lawsuit also says that Prince Mohammed created the "Tiger Squad" and appointed Al-Qahtani to power. Two years later, it was the Tiger Squad that would kill the Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Istanbul.