Mom Fighting Saudi Prince for Daughter Falls to Death

A French woman embroiled in a custody dispute over her daughter with a Saudi prince plunged to her death last week in Paris—and her lawyer says it was not suicide. Candice Cohen-Ahnine, 35, even told relatives she felt "threatened" several days before falling from her fourth-floor apartment off the Champs Elysees, the Daily Mail reports. So far, it seems she was fleeing her apartment and trying to enter the flat next door through an open window when she fell.

Cohen-Ahnine had a baby girl with Sattam al-Saud (of the Saudi royal family) after they met in a London nightclub in 1998. But their relationship soured so badly that al-Saud once locked her in a room with rotten food and no water, and she fled to the French embassy in Riyadh, according to Cohen-Ahnine's book Give My Daughter Back. In January she won a Paris court order to have daughter Aya returned, and was planning to retrieve her from Saudi Arabia next month. But al-Saud insisted that "France has not got a right to take her back. She is a Saudi citizen and a princess." (Read about a Saudi royal aide who got 10 years for a New York hotel rape.)