Suha Arafat, wife of the late Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, who owns a home in Malta, is wanted on corruption charges, a Tunisian Justice Ministry spokesman has told AFP.

Her Tunisian citizenship and that of her daughter were reportedly revoked in 2007.

Mrs Arafat’s brother, Jubran Taweel, is the Palestinian Ambassador to Malta.

Tunisian Justice Ministry spokesman Kadhem Zine al Abidine told the French news agency that a warrant was issued for the 48-year-old Mrs Arafat, a citizen of Tunisia until her citizenship was stripped.

The allegations go back to a 2006 business deal, when Suha Arafat had a fallout with the former first lady of Tunisia over the establishment of an international school in Tunis, AFP quoted Tunisian newspapers as saying.

A Tunisian newspaper at the time had said that Suha Arafat’s house in Malta had been bought for her by Muammar Gaddafi. She had denied the claims.

In 2007, Mrs Arafat was declared persona non grata in Tunisia and had her citizenship revoked, reportedly by presidential decree. Mrs Arafat was living in Malta, for at least several months a year.

Since the ouster of former Tunisian dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, a number of former regime officials have been charged with corruption.

Mrs Arafat was raised as a Catholic in Ramallah and Nablus and studied at the Sorbonne in Paris.

She met Yasser Arafat when she was on assignment in Jordan for a French newspaper and was immediately appointed as a public relations adviser to the PLO and later as an economic consultant to her husband. The two married secretly in 1990 at Mr Arafat’s house in Tunisia and kept the wedding secret for 15 months.

She drew sharp criticism from many Palestinians when she tried to prevent senior Palestinian Authority officials, including chairman Mahmoud Abbas, from visiting her husband while he was being treated in a military hospital in Paris.