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Rahaf Mohammed

citizen of Saudi Arabia who fled the country in fear of her life

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ60474193 ↗
Source-derived summary

Rahaf Mohammed (formerly Rahaf Mohammed Mutlaq al-Qunun Al-Shammari; Arabic: رهف محمد مطلق القنون الشمري; born 11 March 2000) is a Saudi woman who fled from her family in 2019. She was detained by Thai authorities on 5 January while in transit through an airport in Bangkok, en route from Kuwait to Australia. She had intended to claim asylum in Australia and escape her family who she says abused her and threatened to kill her for, among other reasons, leaving Islam, an act that is a capital offence under Saudi law.

After she appealed for help on Twitter and gained significant attention, Thai authorities abandoned their plans to forcibly return her to Kuwait (from where she would be repatriated to Saudi Arabia), and she was taken under the protection of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and granted refugee status. On 11 January 2019, she was granted asylum in Canada and arrived in Toronto the next day.

Since her settlement in Canada, she has written a memoir.

Early life

Rahaf was born on 11 March 2000. Her father is the town governor of al-Sulaimi in the Ha'il Region. She has nine siblings. She was raised in a Wahabist family.

Editorial summary

“Rahaf Mohammed” enters the record as citizen of Saudi Arabia who fled the country in fear of her life. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Rahaf, Mohammed and citizen can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA concise reference frame for defining the subject, testing terminology and identifying the institution closest to the evidence. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2000, 2019—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 2000-03-11. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Rahaf, Mohammed and citizen.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Rahaf Mohammed” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Rahaf, Mohammed and citizen provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q60474193. VIAF identifies the subject as 7995164963973724300005. The Library of Congress control number is no2022043897. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2000 and 2019.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Rahaf Mohammed primary sources, Rahaf Mohammed archive and Rahaf research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Rahaf Mohammed” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.