And they lived happily ever after?
It began in true fairytale fashion with a beautiful young woman, a prince and a palace. It ended in every mother's worst nightmare, with her two young children being abducted and brought up by her estranged husband in another country for the next 14 years.
Now the whole unhappy saga may be over for Jacqueline Gillespie and her son and daughter, Idden and Shahirah.The children, who were snatched from their Melbourne home in July 1992 and spirited off to Malaysia by their father, Raja Bahrin, had been apart from their mother since then. But last week, Shahirah, now 20, was reunited with her mother in Australia and her 23yearold brother is set to follow. And one of the country's most notorious custody battles seems poised for a happy ending. Gillespie's story began when she married her Malaysian sweetheart in Melbourne in l981. She was a 17yearold ballet dancer. He was a prince, studying architecture at Melbourne University. Six months later, they moved back to his home in Malaysia where their two children were born. But soon the marriage began to unravel: She alleged he was violent towards her and accused him of taking a second wife. Gillespie fled Malaysia in l985, subsequently winning custody of the children in the Australian Family Court. The father claimed later that he had not been treated fairly by the Australian legal system. The 37yearold prince of the royal court of Terengganu said in an interview then that he had asked his former wife to send the children to Islamic classes. Instead, Shahirah and Iddin converted to Christianity without his consent, an intolerable situation in his eyes as a Muslim. Such was his emotional pain that during an access visit on July 9, 1992, Raja Bahrin decided to keep his children and smuggle them out of the country. He hired a truck, placed the children under a tarpaulin in the back and drove to Queensland. There he got hold of a motor launch and sailed to Merauke in Irian Jaya, now better known as West Papua, part of Indonesia. Without his passport but with the assistance of the Indonesian authorities, he travelled with his children to the Malaysian state of Sabah and then across the South China Sea to the peninsula. Even the fact that the children were Australian citizens held no sway. Under Malaysia's Islamic law, the natural father is entitled to custody when the mother renounces the Muslim faith. Gillespie did not give up easily. She spent years battling the system and even wrote a book on her ordeal, Once I Was A Princess. Slowly her story disappeared from the news until last Saturday, (April 1) when Shahirah flew to Melbourne to be reunited with her mother for the first time in 14 years. By the Straits Times/Asia News Network
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