RAMALLAH: Suha Arafat, the once estranged but loyal wife of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who has incited anger for her extravagant lifestyle abroad, rarely left her husband's side in his last days.

Thirty-four years younger than Arafat, the French-educated daughter of a wealthy Palestinian Christian couple first met the man who was to become her husband 20 years ago when she was a student at the Sorbonne.

Arafat hired her to do public relations for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) when he was exiled in Tunis.

She later became his economic advisor before they married secretly in 1990, only revealing their union two years later.

Their only child, a daughter called Zahwa, was born in 1995 in a private hospital in Paris - but marital life quickly degenerated into de facto separation.

With her dyed-blonde hair, Suha's penchant for expensive clothes and the high-life could not be more different from the veteran leader's trademark military suit and austere obsession with politics.

Suha, a convert to Islam, once complained to an Egyptian newspaper that her husband never gave her any jewels and lived like a bachelor.

"When I complain of being neglected, he offers me souvenirs and symbols of the Palestinian revolution," she said in a rare interview.

However, she later denied that her marriage was on the rocks and called Yasser "the happiest of husbands" who sang "Frere Jacques" - the only French song he knows - to their daughter.

Despite once saying she had "married a myth", Suha never displayed anything less than fierce loyalty to Arafat's dream of a Palestinian state.

For all her Western ways and education, she has said there would have been "no greater honour" than sacrificing any son of hers to the struggle and has backed suicide operations.

After leaving the Middle East in early 2001, to the fury of Palestinians who saw her as betraying their cause for luxury, Suha has since divided her time between Paris and Tunis, where the PLO was based.

Despite her estrangement, six months before rushing to Ramallah to oversee a dying Arafat's transfer to Paris for medical care, Suha said that she was prepared to return to the Palestinian territories "the minute I am asked to".

During her husband's agonising decline in a French hospital, she was one of the few people permanently at his bedside - the picture of a devoted wife watching her husband slip first into unconsciousness and then into death.

But in remarks that harked back to the public blunders that caused problems for the Palestinian leadership earlier in their marriage, she set off a storm on Monday when she accused his top lieutenants of trying to bury him alive.

Her comments prompted the officials to cancel their plans to visit Arafat at his bed side, however she appeared conciliatory when they eventually came.-AFP