Strauss-Kahn charges dropped

The lawyer for the maid accusing Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault said today that the charges against the one-time French presidential hopeful have been dropped.

"The Manhattan attorney, Cyrus Vance, has denied the right to a woman to get justice in a rape case," lawyer Kenneth Thompson said after meeting prosecutors with Strauss-Kahn's accuser, hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo.

Prosecutors summoned Diallo, 32, who says the former International Monetary Fund chief forced her into oral sex when she went to clean his luxury hotel room three months ago.

Strauss-Kahn is free to return to France, where his May 14 arrest in New York and brief imprisonment before being freed on bail, caused a political uproar.

Not only did Strauss-Kahn have to resign as head of the IMF after his arrest, but he had to abandon what was widely expected to be a successful challenge against President Nicolas Sarkozy in upcoming elections.

The case has been one of the most closely watched in New York in many years, pitting the privileged, super-wealthy Frenchman against an illiterate Guinean housemaid employed by the Sofitel hotel in Manhattan.

Initially, prosecutors and police said there was strong evidence of a forced sexual encounter, backed by DNA and traces of Strauss-Kahn's sperm.

But Strauss-Kahn pleaded not guilty and his defence team, led by one of America's most famous trial lawyers, Benjamin Brafman, said any encounter would only have been consensual.

The case began to unravel weeks later when prosecutors announced that Diallo had been caught lying on her asylum application form, including about a gang rape she said she suffered back in her home country of Guinea.

In addition, she was said to have discussed Strauss-Kahn's wealth in a telephone conversation with a Guinean friend currently held in a US prison.

The lying was not directly related to Diallo's account of the alleged sex attack and her lawyers say that she never discussed Strauss-Kahn's wealth.

However, prosecutors would need to convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt in criminal court and, legal experts say, the problems with Diallo's past may have weakened her credibility on the witness stand beyond repair.