The daughter of a former Saudi Crown Prince aide is claiming she was approached by a Saudi agent to travel to Saudi Arabia to meet with her husband and use him as a “pawn,” despite him having allegedly fallen in love with her for decades.
Saudi official Ali bin Fahd, whose real name is Bismarck Bin Yahya, has been stripped of his rank after authorities said he brought his secretary to a building in Istanbul and killed her, CNN reported. Bin Yahya’s wife, Lina Almaeena, was reportedly detained in the same operation.
Her daughter, Heather Vincent, claimed her father is a defense attaché to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. She told reporters that before his wife was killed, bin Yahya invited her father to Turkey in March. He gave her a passport, and she reportedly thought she would be coming to a convention.
But she claims that instead of going to a convention, she found a Saudi agent who offered her work to lure her father from Istanbul and take him back to Saudi Arabia. He allegedly said he’d take his wife in return.
Heather claims that Saudi spies started following her parents in February, and she spotted people collecting information about them and tracking their movements.
“For the past 10 years, it’s been my dream to bring my father back home,” she told CNN.
She claims that she first met bin Yahya in the 1980s, when he took her and her older sister to Abu Dhabi to visit Saudi Arabia. At the time, they were living in Dubai with their mother.
“It was for the purpose of my meeting him, for the purpose of cultivating a relationship and future relationship between my father and myself,” she claimed.
Almaeena told the Daily Mail that she moved into the consulate in 1999 as bin Yahya’s wife, but she divorced him in 2012 because he became abusive.
“Yes, I had a husband, but yes, I was dating,” she said. “He was a great man but he was too needy.”
The mother claims that bin Yahya sent classified information to the Iranian embassy and threatened her security. She said that for some reason, she began seeing a film crew when they stopped by her home.
“It was so abnormal that my husband refused to talk to me about it,” she said. “They took pictures and recorded anything that happened in my home.”