Updated - Adds comments by Suha Arafat
Suha Arafat, the widow of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, said today that she has not been officially notified of an international arrest warrant issued against her at the request of a Tunisian court, and she was astonished by the reports.
In her first comment to the Maltese media, Mrs Arafat strongly denied claims of corruption being made in Tunis over her role in the setting up of a school with Leila Trabelsi the wife of then Tunisian President Ben Ali.(see video)
She said she had actually been a victim of the Tunisian dictatorship and had cut off any links with the school because of 'corruption' by the former President's wife.
Arafat has been living in Malta for the past four years with her daughter.
Arafat and Trabelsi were reported to have fallen out in 2007, purportedly over Suha Arafat's criticism of an alleged move by Trabelsi to close down another private school that would have been in direct competition with their joint venture.
According to a US diplomatic cable revealed by WikiLeaks, Suha Arafat met the then US ambassador after the dispute and lashed out at the ruling family.
She had said that now ousted dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali would spend all day in his residence running after his young son and "simply does what his wife asks him to do".
She was subsequently declared persona non grata, stripped of her Tunisian nationality in 2007, less than a year after acquiring it, and expelled.
She settled in Malta, where her brother served as Palestinian ambassador.
Born into a well-to-do Christian Palestinian family, Suha Arafat married the historic leader in 1990, though the marriage was not revealed until two years later.
She served as secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which was based in Tunisia between 1982 and 1994.
Suha Arafat gave birth to the couple's only child Zahwa in 1995, in a private hospital in Paris, but marital life quickly degenerated into de facto separation.
While her husband shepherded the Palestinian cause in Gaza and Ramallah, Suha was often accused of siphoning the aspiring state's meagre public funds to bankroll her lavish lifestyle in Paris.
After her husband's death in November 2004, Suha Arafat returned to Tunisia, where she was eventually granted Tunisian citizenship for the second time.
Ben Ali was ousted in January following a popular uprising and the country's interim rulers have since initiated hundreds of corruption trials against the exiled dictator and his entourage.
(More details in The Times tomorrow)