Tragic Princess

It was a story worthy of the thousand and one Arabian nights, and the British press played it with grisly gusto. ROYAL FAMILY KILL PRINCESS WHO ELOPED was the headline in the Observer, which spurred competing papers into ferreting out the lurid details. According to first reports, the tragic story involved a Saudi Arabian princess called Misha who married a commoner, thereby incurring the wrath of her princely grandfather; she was shot and her husband beheaded. Leading the Fleet Street pack was the Daily Express, which published some blurry pictures that purported to show the beheading of Misha's lover, taken by a British tourist with an Instamatic concealed in a pack of cigarettes.

"The shame of Araby," protested Express Columnist Jean Rook. "At a stroke which sliced off a man's head in a howling market place the Arabs have put themselves back a thousand and one years in the eyes of the startled, revolted world." Later, the Express located a German-born woman in London who had been a governess to the Saudi royal family. The newspaper ran her narrative under the rubric "the real story by the woman who knew the secrets in the heart of the tragic princess."

As the stories continued, the British Foreign Office issued a statement saying, "We share the regret already widely expressed that such a tragedy should have occurred." This in turn outraged the Saudi Arabian government, which launched a formal protest. British Foreign Secretary David Owen apologized to the Saudi royal family for the Foreign Office statement. That caused Labor M.P. Martin Flannery to introduce a motion in the House of Commons damning Owen's apology as "groveling, humiliating and shameful." The Daily Mail accused Owen of truckling to Saudi oil interests: "So down on your knees, Dr. Owen, before they cut off supplies."

Offering the world a rare glimpse into the mores of the oil-rich desert kingdom, the Saudis confirmed that the executions had taken place, apparently last July. In their protest to the Foreign Office, the Saudis insisted the pair had not been married at all. Indeed, they stressed that marriage of a member of the royal family to a commoner is no crime in Saudi Arabia. The princess and her lover had been executed after a "sentence by an Islamic court for adultery--and for an adulterous act the law is death." According to the Saudi protest the British press stories had "distorted reality and constituted an abuse of the intentions of Islamic law which is based on divine justice and the equality of all people."

Last week some additional facts came to light. The princess in question was Mashall bint Abdul Aziz, 23, whose arranged marriage had gone sour. She had fallen in love with Musleh al Sha'er, the nephew of the Saudi Ambassador to Lebanon, Ali al Sha'er. When their perilous affair was threatened with exposure, they obtained forged passports and attempted to flee the country by air. The princess disguised herself as a man, but was apprehended with her lover when security police at Jeddah airport glimpsed a suspiciously full-busted silhouette under the would-be traveler's traditional flowing thobe.

Under Saudi religious law, adulterers are punished by being stoned to death in public. According to some reports, however, Princess Mashall's sentence was "commuted" to shooting, perhaps because she was the granddaughter of Prince Mohammed, King Khalid's eldest brother (a notoriously ill-tempered man whose nickname is Abu Sharein, Father of the Double Evil). Although the princess's fate received the full Fleet Street treatment, other similar incidents in Saudi Arabia have passed virtually unnoticed. Last year, for example, another princely brother of King Khalid reportedly drowned one of his daughters in a swimming pool when he learned that she had been to bed with a man before her marriage.

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