A French government minister said later yesterday he could not rule out that IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s arrest for alleged sexual assault was the result of a set-up with political motives.

“We cannot rule out the thought of a trap,” Henri de Raincourt, minister for overseas cooperation in President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government, said in a broadcast interview.

“I note that this has happened just after the affair of the car and the suit in a short space of time,” he added, referring to sniping at the Socialist presidential hopeful for using a Porsche and wearing tailor-made clothes.

“I am not ruling anything out,” Mr Raincourt added.

Sniping by Mr Strauss-Kahn’s political rivals has been growing in an election fight that risked getting ever dirtier, against a backdrop of long-standing claims about Mr Strauss-Kahn’s conduct in private with women.

“I am convinced it is an ­international conspiracy,” said Michelle Sabban, a senior ­councillor for the greater Paris region and a Strauss-Kahn loyalist.

“It’s not like him. Everyone knows that his weakness is seduction, women. That’s how they got him.”

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