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I.M.F. Head Is Arrested and Accused of Sexual Attack

By AL BAKER

The head of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, was taken in custody on Saturday, minutes before he was to fly to Paris from John F. Kennedy International Airport, the authorities said.

He was accused of a sex attack on a maid earlier in the day at a Times Square hotel, the authorities said.  

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, a candidate for president of France, was taken off an Air France flight by officers from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and turned over to Manhattan detectives, according to a Port Authority spokesman. He was expected to be taken to the offices of the Manhattan Special Victims Unit at P.S.A. 5 in Manhattan, another official said.

It was about 4:45 p.m. when plainclothes detectives of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey suddenly boarded the plane, Air France Flight 23, as it idled on the tarmac at the airport 10 minutes before it was scheduled to take off and took Mr. Strauss-Kahn into custody, according to an agency official.

The Port Authority officers were acting on information from the New York Police Department, whose detectives had been investigating a brutal attack of a woman employee at the hotel Sofitel New York, at 45 West 44th Street, in the heart of the city’s theater district.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn had been considered a leading contender to run on the Socialist Party’s ticket against President Nicolas Sarkozy. A former economics professor, Mr. Strauss-Kahn rose to political prominence first as a deputy in parliament in the 1980’s and then as a finance minister under socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, a post he held until 1999. Mr. Strauss-Kahn eventually sought the socialist party’s presidential nomination himself in 2007 — calling for an “anti-Sarkozy front” — but lost to Segolene Royal. Months later he was tapped to run the I.M.F. and received Sarkozy’s support, which many critics called a strategy by Sarkozy to keep Mr. Strauss-Kahn away from the forefront of the socialist party.

But Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who is married to a prominent television news reporter, has been dogged by scandal. In 2008 he was embroiled in a controversy after accusations arose that he had had a sexual relationship with one of his subordinates, Piroska Nagy, a senior official in the I.M.F.’s Africa Department. The I.M.F. hired a law firm to launch an investigation, and Ms. Nagy left the fund and went to work for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. With the I.M.F. needed to quell the international economic meltdown, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was kept on the job. He later apologized for an “error in judgment.”

Formed at the end of World War II, the I.M.F provides low-cost loans to countries in financial crisis. After 2008, it became more relevant after brokering rescue packages for countries like Greece, Pakistan, Iceland, Hungary and Ukraine