Harbant Gill and Holly Lloyd-McDonald
05apr06
THE stolen daughter of Jacqueline Gillespie has returned to Melbourne after 14 years. Shahirah Gillespie, now 20, was snatched as a seven-year-old by her father, a Malaysian prince, in 1992.
Shahirah and her mother, a former ballet dancer who now goes by the name Jacqueline Pascarl-Gillespie, kept out of the limelight last night.
But Prince Raja Bahrin, who grabbed Shahirah and her brother Iddin during an access visit more than a decade ago, last night confirmed his daughter flew into Melbourne on Saturday to visit her mother.
"She wants to be with her mother, so what is there for me to say?" he said from Malaysia.
"It is only natural that she wants to visit her mother. She is a big girl now, going to be 21."
Prince Bahrin said Iddin, now 23, was studying at college and had not yet said he wanted to visit his mother.
"Let's take one thing at a time," he said.
"It is up to the kids so let things take their course. I don't think we should speculate about the future.
"I've said too much.
"I don't want this story to be another 'start all over again'. It's just a family visit."
Prince Bahrin snatched his children from a Little Collins St hotel room during an access visit in July 1992.
They were hidden in the back of a ute under a tarp and driven to North Queensland where a rickety boat took them to Indonesian waters.
The case became one of the most high-profile custody battles in Australian history with the Federal Government and federal police stepping in, unsuccessfully, to bring the children home.
A tortured Jacqueline Gillespie never gave up the fight to get back her children.
Prince Bahrin last night played down what would be an emotional reunion.
"We don't want this to be another media situation where the family has a problem spending quality time with her mother," he said. "She doesn't want people talking and looking at her.
"I think she just wants to have a quiet time with the family."
Jacqueline Gillespie met and fell in love with Raja Bahrin when she was a 17-year-old ballet dancer and he was an architecture student at Melbourne University.
They married at Malaysia's Terengganu royal palace in March 1981.
The pair lived in Australia for six months before returning to Malaysia where they had two children.
Two weeks after Shahirah was born, the prince took another wife under Islamic law.
As his marriage to Ms Gillespie allegedly grew violent, she decided to escape and flew back to Australia with the children to visit her sick grandmother.
She filed for divorce in the Family Court in 1985 and received custody, but granted Prince Bahrin access.
After many court battles, the prince smuggled his children to Malaysia -- and they haven't seen their mother since.
In 1990, Ms Gillespie married TV journalist Iain Gillespie, but they divorced in 2000.
It is believed their marriage buckled because of the emotional and financial strain of the case.
Ms Gillespie now has a four-year-old daughter, Verity Isabelle, born in 2001 to a Sydney businessman who left her at eight-months pregnant to return to his wife.
After her stint in Sydney, she returned to Melbourne in 2002, and in what was described as a whirlwind romance, married Hawthorn software accounts manager Bill Crocaris in a civil ceremony rotunda in Kew's Alexandra Gardens.
She now combines her maiden name Pascarl and Gillespie.
Several years ago, Prince Bahrin acknowledged his ex-wife sent cards to her children about "twice a year, with a letter".
He said the children had written back to her, but they hadn't expressed any desire to visit their mother -- until now.
In 1999, Ms Gillespie described the feeling of having her children snatched out of her life as like "having a gigantic apple corer taken to your body and most of your soul removed".
She has written a book, Once I was a Princess, about the abduction.
Herald Sun
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