Tunisia yet to explain warrant against Suha Arafat

Tunisian authorities have yet to explain whether a warrant issued for Suha Arafat – widow of the historical Palestinain leader Yasser Arafat – is for questioning as a suspect or a witness in connection to a corruption probe linked to former First Lady Leila Trabelsi.

The Maltese police still had no information about the warrant issued by the Tunisian authorities, and it remains unknown if the warrant is in fact an international arrest warrant, as was widely reported by news agencies on Monday.

MaltaToday is reliably informed that so far, the Tunisian authorities have not issued any extradition order for Suha Arafat.

Sources close to Arafat told MaltaToday that Tunisian lawyers engaged to look into the much publicised investigation, have reported that the judge who issued the alleged warrant was "unreachable."

Malta had signed an extradition treaty with Tunisia in December 2006 during an official visit by former Tunisian justice minister Bechir Tekkari, who incidentally was arrested on 11 July, over corruption and embezzlement claims during Ben Ali’s regime.

After his release on 3 August, rumours circulated on Facebook and other social media sites that Tekkari had fled Tunisia via the Monastir airport, however interior ministry sources affirmed that Tekkari is under a travel ban and unable to leave Tunisian borders.

International news agencies reported Monday that the Tunisian government had issued a warrant for Suha Arafat, and a justice ministry spokesman did not provide details about the warrant, or the investigation.

The Tunisian state-run news agency reported however that the warrant was “quietly issued last week” and summoned Suha Arafat for questioning as part of an investigation into alleged high-level corruption by former government officials, including the ousted President Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali, who fled into in exile to Saudi Arabia last January.

The warrant for Suha Arafat comes at a time of shifting political trends in Tunisia, after an election last week set the stage for a governing coalition led by the country’s moderate Islamist party.

Suha Arafat – who has been living in Malta since 2007 after being stripped of Tunisian citizenship and declared ‘persona non grata’ by Ben Ali’s regime – was swift to reject claims of her involvement in any corruption, and stressed that she is a victim of Ben Ali’s family.

According to media reports in Tunisia, the investigation involving Suha Arafat appears to be connected to her previous business partnership with Leila Trabelsi, who in 2006 had co-founded the International School of Carthage.

The deposed regime had donated a large tract of public land and a $1.5 million grant to Leila Trabelsi for the school in the summer of 2007.

A US diplomatic cable revealed last year by WikiLeaks, said that Arafat and Trabelsi had fallen out over the forced closure of another school, the Louis Pasteur-Bouabdelli, which would have been a direct competitor of the new school.

Suha Arafat had opposed the closure, and allegedly lambasted Leila Trabelsi for what she described as being an “immoral move”.

Another US cable explains the content of a conversation Suha Arafat had with the American ambassador in Tunis Robert F. Godec over the matter: “I can’t believe what she has done to me,” Arafat was quoted in November 2007, adding also that she had “lost everything”.

Arafat has since engaged a Tunisian lawyer to protect her interests at law with the Tunisian judiciary, and secretly transferred herself to Gozo yesterday.