AS Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian leader, lay dying in a Paris hospital in November 2004, his wife Suha was told to keep talking to him. It was the last hope of bringing him out of his coma.

“I talked to him about the things he cherished most,” she said last week in her first interview since his death. “Palestine, Jerusalem . . . his childhood and his mother. We played him his favourite verses from the Koran too, but he never regained consciousness.”

Arafat’s illness put her under a harsh spotlight. Reports claimed Suha was haggling over the terms of a will and pressing senior Palestinian officials for millions of dollars to sustain her supposedly lavish lifestyle after her husband had gone.

“These were the worst days of my life,” said Suha, who now lives quietly in Malta with her mother and 12-year-old daughter Zahwa. Arafat left no will, no properties and no millions, she said.

According to Suha, 44, she receives a pension from the Palestinian Authority of $10,000 (£5,000) a month – a large sum to many Palestinians but far from the exorbitant figures being bandied around on the eve of Arafat’s death.

“I did not know night from day,” said Suha. “I often thought what was happening around me was a nightmare and that I would wake up to discover that it was not true.”

Under French law, doctors provide medical information only to next of kin and the leader’s wife was accused of keeping the world in the dark about the condition of her husband, a legend to his people.

He had fallen ill during a meeting and Palestinian doctors at first described it as flu. This became food poisoning. Soon he was being treated by doctors from Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt. They could do nothing for him and he was flown to the French military hospital just outside Paris.

“I did not want to pass too much information to the world so as to protect my husband,” said Suha, “and to try to discover the cause of his illness.”

Arafat had spent three years under siege by the Israeli army in his headquarters. The belief among followers that he had been poisoned by the enemy was encouraged by the silence from Paris, where doctors seemed powerless to cure him of the rare blood disorder that was to claim his life three years ago today.

“My husband was a martyr,” said Suha without hesitation, when asked whether she believed her husband had been assassinated. “There was something there, but the medical reports were never conclusive. They just could not find concrete evidence. I don’t think that we will ever know.”

As for her own “martyrdom” in the media, she was philosophical. “This is all about Yasser Arafat, who had many well-known enemies. It is what I call character assassination,” she said.

“Attacking his wife and family would hurt him personally and directly and that’s why they did it . . . They even invented rumours about the health of my daughter – it was claimed she had leukaemia.”

Suha had been accused of living it up in Paris as Arafat braved an Israeli siege of his compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

She was rumoured to own properties in the French capital and to spend her time shopping with the wife of Adnan Khashoggi, the billionaire Saudi arms dealer, and the sister of the King of Morocco. None of it was true, she said.

“I have met Mrs Khashoggi once and never went shopping with her,” said Suha. “I own no property whatsoever. My rented apartment in Paris is an old, ordinary building.”

For nearly three years, Suha and her family had been living in Tunisia but they were stripped of their citizenship last August, apparently after a dispute with the president’s wife over the establishment of a school.

Suha laughed off rumours that the problems had been connected to her plans to marry the brother of the Tunisian first lady.

“There’s not a shred of truth in it,” she said, adding that personal belongings, including her husband’s papers, had been “confiscated” by Tunisia. “I hope we will have them returned to us soon.”

She talked wistfully of her first meeting in 1985 with the chairman of the PLO.

“I visited him with my mother and sisters,” said Suha. “I was 22, Arafat was in his mid-fifties. He was the leader who had put the Palestinian cause on the world map.”

Suha, the daughter of a banker and a writer, had spent her childhood in the West Bank. She went to a Catholic school before attending the Sorbonne in Paris, from where she graduated in 1986 in political science and linguistics.

At a subsequent meeting with Arafat, Suha discovered that he kept a photograph of her.

“He told me he liked me from the first time that he had laid eyes on me and kept saying, ‘If you were older I would have married you’.”

She kept visiting Arafat, often as a messenger for her mother Raymonda al-Tawil, an activist in the Palestinian cause who came from a wealthy, landowning family in northern Israel. The couple married secretly in Tunisia in 1989. Things were so bad at that time for the Palestinians that a wedding seemed out of place for Arafat and it was not until 1991 that they announced their union to the world.

Today the future seems bleak as rival bands from Fatah – Arafat’s group – and Hamas vie for control of Palestinian territory. Suha said if Arafat were alive, this descent into internecine conflict would never have happened.

“The unity of the Palestinian factions and people was paramount,” she said. “It is very sad what is happening in Palestine. This is not good for the cause of peace. I am not optimistic.”

Yesterday Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president, unveiled an £800,000 glass-and-stone mausoleum for Arafat in Ramallah to commemorate the anniversary of his death. But Suha’s hope is that this will not be her husband’s final resting place.

“His will was to be buried in Jerusalem and never let go of Palestinian rights,” she said. “This is why I’m asking the Palestinian Authority to write on his grave that it is temporary. His body will be moved to Jerusalem one day and I will make sure this is done.” Baria Alamuddin is senior writer for Al-Hayat newspaper, which publishes a longer version of this interview today

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