When 63-year-old Albert Douglas landed at Heathrow airport after four years languishing in prison in Dubai, the first thing he did was kiss the ground.
He looked up, and, scooping himself off the ground, saw his 11-year-old granddaughter. Tears began spilling down his cheeks.
As the British businessman speaks to me now, he is still wearing part of his prison uniform – a plain, white T-shirt – beneath his grey jumper. He looks frail and thin, but musters brief smiles.
When I ask why he still wears the garment – no doubt drenched in the trauma of years of torture in jail – he says he doesn’t know.
But it’s no surprise Albert still wraps himself up in the memories of his own personal hellscape, because he’s still living in it: every night, his sleep is disturbed by a recurring nightmare, jolting him bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat.
The scars of his time in a cell still remain. On release, he weighed just 9st 6lb compared to 12st 8lb when he was first imprisoned.
‘God didn’t give me these injuries. I suffer now from blackouts. I had my broken shoulder, which wasn’t properly fixed. I had three fingers that were broken,’ he says, holding up his hand to the camera, ‘I have a back injury.’
Hailing from Enfield, north London, Albert first landed in Dubai in the late 90s and took advantage of the massive property boom, soon becoming a successful businessman in the quickly developing desert city that promised to transform far-flung dreams into reality.
But now, he has a stark warning to other Brits eager to reinvent their lives in the glitzy, ultra-modern emirate of skyscrapers and golden sand: ‘Be careful and be aware of what happened to me – it could very, very easily happen to you.’
When 63-year-old Albert Douglas landed at Heathrow airport after four years languishing in prison in Dubai, the first thing he did was kiss the ground
Albert Douglas, 63, reuniting with his son, Wolfgang, 39, in Heathrow Airport, December 2025
Albert and Wolfgang Douglas with his grandchildren following his years of hell in Dubai prison
Albert’s message to ambitious émigrés arrives at a salient moment, where countless foreigners who settled in Dubai for a better life have witnessed their hopes crumble around them amid the crisis in the Middle East.
Ever since the Israeli-US war on Iran broke out, expats are seeing a repressive and dictatorial side to their rulers, after warnings from the authorities that they faced fines or even imprisonment for sharing footage from ‘unknown’ sources related to the conflict.
So far, 21 people – including a 60-year-old British tourist – have reportedly been charged in relation to sharing content related to Iranian attacks, as influencers scramble for the first flight they can get their hands on out of the warzone and into safety.
After his four years of incarceration in Dubai, Albert has one piece of chilling advice to those considering the move: ‘If you get in trouble, and you’re a British citizen in the United Arab Emirates, forget the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office.
‘It can’t help you. They’ll give you a lot of comfort in soft words, but that’s it. No more.’
When he first made the move himself, he believed the rule of law would protect him, as a law-abiding citizen.
It was only after his life was snatched away in seconds that he realised the scale of corruption in the judicial system.
‘I assure you, I’m not the only one. There are dozens, even hundreds of people that are in the same situation. It’s endemic in their system: not a one-off, it’s accepted.’
But when Albert emigrated permanently to Dubai with his wife Naomi in 2002, it seemed like he was entering a different, better world to the one he left behind in London, and was soon living the high-life with his Rolls Royce, enjoying the city’s futuristic skyline.
His flooring business – Alomi Real Wood Floors – was thriving, so much so that he encouraged his son Wolfgang to ditch the UK, join him in Dubai and set up his own company, TimberWolf Flooring.
Together, the father and son enjoyed great success, supplying wooden flooring for mega-projects such as the Burj Khalifa, La Mer beach and City Walk and enjoying life on the world-renowned man-made island of Palm Jumeirah, shaped like a palm tree.
The family were originally embraced by the Emirati elite, and invited to exclusive dinners and parties. The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, even gifted them a pet tiger cub, Snowy, which eventually grew too large to handle.
Albert himself lived in a £6million mansion on the Palm Jumeirah island and soon most of the family was living there too, where celebrities including David and Victoria Beckham and Brad Pitt own villas.
But gradually, it became increasingly difficult for Wolfgang to recoup the payments for the multi-million-pound government-related projects he was doing, and he soon became unable to pay back his creditors.
The 39-year-old briefly left the city in 2019 and went back to the UK for medical treatment after an emergency, but back in Dubai, police had begun to seize his goods without paperwork.
Albert joined him in London, but made the fateful decision to return to Dubai that same year to resume his own business.
Unable to reach Wolfgang, the UAE authorities arrested the grandfather at Dubai international airport, ordering him to pay a £2.5million fine and handing him a three-year prison sentence.
He had no association with his son’s company when he was arrested, apart from being listed on a legal document of the flooring business, set up in 2007.
The authorities later produced a bounced cheque the 63-year-old is alleged to have signed, which Albert vehemently denies (this was later verified by a forensic report, but the evidence was never acknowledged by the court).
In 2025, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled following a four-year investigation that Albert’s detention was arbitrary and had no legal basis under international law.
But it seems that expats arriving in the UAE to do business are always playing a risky game, where the cost could be their life.
While generally a civil matter elsewhere, debt can lead to immediate jailtime, and the legal system can be manipulated to punish foreigners who fall out of favour with the Emirati upper echelons.
Radha Stirling, the founder of Detained in Dubai who supported the family throughout the case, told the Daily Mail: ‘As an expert witness, I have testified that success makes you more vulnerable in Dubai.
‘Investors become targets in a system that allows baseless allegations to be used as a premise to strip entrepreneurs of their assets, wealth and their freedom.
‘The lack of transparency, fair trials, and the prevalence of arbitrary detention, discrimination and human rights abuses are the reasons UK courts have continuously refused extradition requests, and why so many entrepreneurs have found themselves behind bars in what is promoted as a safe investment hub.’
She said that if someone wants to steal your assets and money in Dubai, all they need to do is make a complaint at a police station.
‘Due to the lack of judicial process and entrenched corruption within law enforcement, that is often all that is required. The UN has now cleared Albert and his son but it’s not enough. They are seeking real accountability.’
The ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, even gifted the father and son a pet tiger cub, Snowy, which eventually grew too large for Wolfgang to handle
Albert and Wolfgang were originally taken in by the Emirati elite, and invited to exclusive dinners and parties. Pictured together following Albert’s release
Released on bail, a distressed Albert took his case to the supreme court, but when that failed, the family hatched a plan for him to escape.
With the help of a shadowy group of people smugglers, Albert attempted to cross the border from Al Ain, Abu Dhabi, over to Oman in the early hours of February 17, 2021.
But as he was creeping along the barbed wire fence, trying to locate a pre-cut hole to climb through, gunshots abounded and he was quickly apprehended by UAE soldiers closing in on him.
Then began the start of his nightmare, he claims. He was arrested, stripped and hooded, before being jailed in Abu Dhabi’s Al Ain Prison, where he was beaten until he was unconscious by three guards.
According to the family, it was that attack that caused him to develop Alzheimer’s disease and suffer from several strokes.
At one point, he said, he was forced outside in the baking sun for 72 hours with no food, and forced to drink water from a toilet to quench his thirst.
Over the next years, he was incarcerated in several high-security facilities across Dubai – including Bur Dubai police station, Al Barsha and Al Awir Central Prison – where, he claims, he was tortured by guards, deprived of food, water and medical treatment, and witnessed the rape and suicides of fellow inmates.
On one occasion, he was trying to connect to his family from an Al Barsha prison phone when another inmate attacked him from behind.
‘Everyone was thrown in there. There were murderers, rapists, drug dealers, and the ones that were most scary were people who were mentally impaired,’ Albert said.
‘I’m not going to use “insane”, because most of them could quite easily have been treated with the right medication, but because there is no medication given to you – no proper care – these people were mentally unstable.
‘It was one of them that attacked me and tried to kill me. They wrapped a wire around my neck and attacked me with a stick,’ he said. The only reason Albert survived the assault was because of the bravery of another prisoner who stepped in to save him.
He described Al Barsha as dismal, so overcrowded inmates could barely walk. ‘You had to sort of tippy-toe along a little, tiny corridor, because people slept on the floor, slept in the toilet, slept anywhere.’
One day, he decided to count the number of prisoners, reached 200, then lost count. ‘I was in that particular facility for three months, and I never saw daylight, because there’s no windows.
‘I remember the first day I went into it, they opened the door. It was like: “Oh, the smell!” Just sweat. After a time, I couldn’t smell anything. You do learn to live with it, but obviously that smell was still there.’
The prison was so filthy that Albert, like countless other inmates, developed scabies.
And when the rape of other prisoners occurred, it happened ‘less than a stone’s throw away, just a few metres’, by a gang of men who routinely ‘preyed on young people’.
Albert was on the bottom bunk bed, and the victim was on the top, suffering through the horrific attacks every night.
The grandfather said a fellow inmate, a British man from Liverpool, attempted to intervene and stop the rape, but he was in turn beaten up by the perpetrators as punishment for speaking out.
In June 2021, after swapping between different facilities, Albert was transferred to Al Awir, Dubai’s central prison, an enormous complex on the outskirts of the city, where he would spend most of his sentence.
When asked how he survived in such squalid conditions, the businessman said he managed to put himself into a kind of daily coma so that he’d just sleep throughout the lonely day and night.
‘All the prisoners used to say, “How do you do it? What’s your trick?” I don’t know how I did it, but I did, and I can only assume I blocked it out.
‘You’re locked up for 23 to 24 hours a day. More often than not it’s 24 hours… and there are no facilities that really exist, they have a library, you have to wait three months to go.
‘They have a gym. I think I went twice in four years… There’s nothing to look forward to, the food is inedible, every meal comes with a side order of cockroaches.’
Sleep, he said, was the only way to survive.
Albert pictured having surgery in a hospital in the UAE after being physically attacked by prison guards, who beat him up until he was unconscious
Back in London, Wolfgang was campaigning for his father’s release, and has altogether spent £4million in legal fees along the way. From lobbying MPs to organising protests and working closely with the UN, he stopped at nothing to see the freedom of his father.
Before Albert landed in Heathrow in December, Wolfgang spoke to the Daily Mail, saying: ‘I’ve worked and given my whole life in the pursuit of clearing his name. I took a name badge the day [he got arrested] which said: “Advocate of Albert Douglas”. I would give the pennies I didn’t have to save my father.’
Now that Albert is safe and home, Wolfgang is not wasting a single second getting to know his father again, and spends his days accompanying him to endless hospital appointments as part of his rehabilitation.
He was told by countless legal experts that ‘getting your father out of this prison would be the equivalent of putting your hand in a grave and bringing someone out’, because being in one of these ‘debtors’ prisons’ is the equivalent to being a ‘dead man walking’.
Indeed, Albert at one point shared a cell with two well-known British citizens who are still languishing in UAE prison today due to the alleged corruption of the system: property developer Ryan Cornelius and his business partner Charles Ridley.
They were imprisoned in 2008 after a fraud conviction related to a loan from Dubai Islamic Bank and handed a 10-year sentence. Meanwhile, the bank seized assets worth $1.6billion – three times the value of the original loan – including Cornelius’s family home in London.
But in 2018, their sentence was extended by a further 20 years, and there are no signs pointing to their imminent release.
Albert was sure he’d share the same fate – of being stuck with an ever-increasing prison sentence with no end date in sight.
In February 2021, he was handed a sentence of two years, reduced to 18 months, but ended up being incarcerated right up until May 2025.
By then, the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention had taken up the case and submitted its findings to the UAE authorities.
Albert was finally released from prison, but handed a travel ban, barring him exit from the city until his deportation to the UK in December.
It took that long, despite the fact that the grandfather was pardoned by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum back in November 2023.
‘As far as I’m concerned, I was in a prison for just shy of five years, for a two year sentence, which should have been 18 months. I was way over my sentence; I was being arbitrarily detained,’ he said.
Now free, Albert has a message for the UK Foreign Office, who he believes completely gave up on him because of the economic pressure it was under to maintain a good trade relationship with UAE authorities.
‘The FCDO did nothing for me. They provided me five years of soft words. Always comforting, but in reality, they did zero.
‘And I now understand why, and it’s because they’ve been given two jobs to do at the same time. One, to look after my rights, and by doing so, they have to take it up with the UAE authorities…
‘But if they do that, they’re doing it with the same people that they’ve been tasked to “woo” to get investment. So on one hand, they have to cuddle up to these people and be nice to them, and on the other hand they have a stick to beat them.’
This double-bind means Albert felt he was sacrificed by his own government, and while he’s safe now, he’s ‘not the only one’ who has suffered, and countless other British citizens still remain arbitrarily incarcerated in the region.
The family’s frustration with the British government is why Wolfgang plans to bring legal proceedings against the FCDO, in an attempt to get compensation but also a formal change to the travel advice given to UK citizens about the UAE.
He believes the government didn’t do enough to secure the freedom of his father and willfully misled the press about the torture and mistreatment he was experiencing.
‘Arab dictators don’t shock me when they act like Arab dictators… You shouldn’t be shocked when they use their draconian laws in their favour,’ said Wolfgang.
‘But the shock was the Foreign Office. The shock was how we berate Donald Trump day in, day out, on the media, but we sell human rights for pennies.’
He continued: ‘What scares me is how we bow to them so easily. How Westminster is so weak and soft on foreign policy. And it was only until the point I got to Westminster that I realised just how soft and how weak we are.’
He firmly believes that if US President Donald Trump was handling the case, Albert ‘would have been out straight away’.
‘He would have picked up the phone to say: “What evidence? Is it real? Is it not? That’s enough. Get him out.” But not us.’
Albert Douglas on a previous birthday with two of his grandchildren, before his incarceration
At the moment, Albert is enjoying the simple pleasures of his new existence, as he adjusts to ‘a new life, a life that I never thought for one moment I would ever experience again’.
‘You can eat what you want, drink what you want.’ The day we spoke, he had eaten a bacon sandwich with HP Sauce for breakfast. ‘Totally unhealthy, but also totally delicious.’
Another new joy, but one he’s still adjusting to, is being able to think and speak freely.
‘In the UAE, there are basically no human rights. Speaking your mind in any way detrimental to the government of the UAE can get you put in jail, and when you are in jail, you are under scrutiny all the time.’
After years of being trapped in Dubai, the grandfather still feels ‘indoctrinated in that way of thinking’, so it doesn’t feel natural to talk without first thinking carefully about whether it’s safe to say what he wants to say.
‘I still think before I speak,’ he says, and it’ll be a long time before talking freely feels normal again, but he’s enjoying the process of feeling more psychologically free.
He has also spent a great deal of time reconnecting with his five grandchildren, particularly his daughter’s autistic son.
‘He’s an absolute delight. I’m learning about autistic behaviour. I’ve got a long, long way to go, but I would hope that I’m giving her a little support, even if it’s only moral support, and I take that very seriously. That takes up most of my time.’
As for the prison T-shirt he refuses to part with, Albert says he’s in a constant Tom and Jerry-style competition with his daughter-in-law, who is ‘always threatening to put it in the dustbin, and I actually have to go in sometimes and retrieve it’.
‘It’s this constant battle,’ he says. ‘She actually destroyed the towel that came from the prison. She got the towel and she destroyed it, but she was telling me it was in the wash. So now I have to keep this away from her,’ he added, clutching the white shirt.
Clearly, Albert has a long road ahead of him as he continues to grapple with the PTSD incurred from his imprisonment. Crucially, he knows he’s not alone, and he keeps his past inmates in his heart as he embarks on this new phase of life.
‘The case of Albert Douglas, which we took to the United Nations, and in which his detention was found to be arbitrary, demonstrates the severity of the risks involved and how quickly a successful foreign businessman can be deprived of his freedom and be subjected to grave human rights abuses,’ Stirling told the Daily Mail.
‘Once an individual becomes a target, the situation can rapidly escalate beyond legal pressure into detention conditions where there is a real risk of ill-treatment and torture.
‘I have long warned investors that the risks go far beyond financial loss. They do not just stand to lose their money and life savings, but also their freedom and, in the most serious cases, their lives.’
When contacted by the Daily Mail for comment, an FCDO spokesperson said: ‘We supported a British man in the UAE and were in contact with his family.’
