Abbas chief of staff denies sex charges

Ramallah, West Bank (News Terupdate) - The chief of staff for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is denying allegations that he used the power of his office to extract sex from a female job seeker.

Rafiq Husseini, the second in command in President Abbas' office, spoke to the media in a hastily arranged news conference Sunday after the Palestinian Authority controlled WAFA news agency reported that Abbas had suspended Husseini from his job for three weeks and a committee had been formed to look into the charges of sexual misconduct against him.

The controversy comes on the heels of a television report aired by Israel's Channel 10 showing grainy surveillance footage of Husseini undressing in a bedroom and calling for a woman to join him in bed. The footage shot in 2008 was shot and provided to Channel 10 by Fahmi Shabaneh, a former agent in the Palestinian Authority's General Intelligence Department.

Shabaneh told CNN that he released the tape to the media to expose ethical and financial corruption within the Palestinian Authority. Shabaneh said he had brought evidence of both sexual and financial wrongdoing to Abbas before going public, but that he was ignored.

Shabaneh told CNN that he received permission from his superior officer to make the clandestine recording of Husseini after a Palestinian woman had approached him complaining that Husseini was trying to "sexually blackmail her." The tape was made in cooperation with the woman who had brought the allegations, he said.

In a prepared statement, Husseini told reporters that he had been framed by a gang "working for the interest of Israeli intelligence" and said the tape was "dubbed" and that he would not "submit to financial or political blackmail" and continue to fight for Palestinian national rights.

"The fight of corruption in Palestine has a price and also fighting the occupation and especially in Jerusalem also has a price..." Husseini said, "but fighting corruption and the occupation at the same time has a huge price on me I have to bear."

Husseini suggested that he had spoken to Abbas about the situation and indicated his willingness to cooperate with the committee assigned with investigating the matter.

For its part the Palestinian Authority responded aggressively to the allegations of misconduct in the Israeli television report calling them part of a "rabid smear campaign."

Tayeb Abdul-Rahim, the secretary-general in Abbas' office, said the evidence in the report was fabricated by the Israeli media and government with the aim of "recycling baseless lies and asinine stories told by a former junior officer in the Palestinian intelligence service who was sacked more than two years (ago) from his position."

Abdul-Rahim also suggested that Shabaneh was "collaborating with the Israeli side" and had "committed a number of abuses and breaches that showed his lack of honesty."

In the Israeli television report and in a subsequent interview with CNN, Shabaneh pointed to various documents as proof of embezzlement by Palestinian Authority officials, but did not provide copies for closer scrutiny. Shabaneh has said that if the Palestinian Authority and President Abbas, also referred to as Abu Mazen, did not move to act against the corruption that he would soon release more evidence.

"All of this is nothing. I have three warehouses of documents, but these three files would bring Abu Mazen down if there was an honorable Arab and Islamic leadership."

The allegations have sparked animated debate within Palestinian society and elicited some withering criticism of the Palestinian Authority. In an editorial the editor-in-chief of the independent Maan News Agency, Nasser Laham, lamented "the Palestinian reaction to these revelations should be outrage. Instead, it has been complacency. The leadership has unfortunately adopted the same tired and evasive tactics, failing to take responsibility..."

Laham also argued that Shabaneh should be prosecuted "not for exposing corruption but for violating the law for the precedent it would set were every other intelligence agent permitted to hand over... classified information to Israel."

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