Jewish Mom in Custody Battle With Saudi Prince
A Saudi prince is facing an international arrest warrant for not handing over custody of his 10-year-old daughter to her French-Jewish mother.
The Paris criminal court ordered Prince Sattam al-Saud, of the royal Saudi family, to give the little girl, Aya, to her mother, Candice Cohen-Ahnine. The prince, however, says he is not planning to do so. “France hasn’t got the right to take her back. She is a Saudi citizen and a princess. They cannot oblige a princess to leave this country,” he reportedly said.
In a he-said/she-said battle resulting from an interfaith romance gone sour, al-Saud refutes Cohen-Ahnine’s charges that he kidnapped both mother and daughter. The prince reportedly gave Cohen-Ahnine the option of becoming his second wife and living with him in his Riyadh palace when he became obligated to marry a cousin in 2006 (he and Cohen-Ahnine had met at a London nightclub in 1998 and their daughter was born in 2001), but she refused and they separated.
Cohen-Ahnine claims that the prince detained her and the little girl against their will while they were on a visit to Saudi Arabia in 2008. The mother managed to escape the palace and seek refuge in the French embassy, but the daughter remained behind. According to the Telegraph, Cohen-Ahnine had to be secretly taken out of the country because al-Saud had produced a document purporting that she had converted from Islam to Judaism, which is a crime punishable by death in Saudi Arabia.
It looks as though neither efforts by the Sarkozy government on behalf of Cohen-Ahnine, nor the French court’s custody and $13,000 per month child support order are going to help all that much. “What do I care of Sarkozy?” al-Saud told Nouvel Observateur magazine. “If need be, I’ll go like [Osama] bin Laden and hide in the mountains with Aya.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
