IMF managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn was taken into custody on Saturday at JFK airport in New York and was being questioned in regard to a sexual assault, a New York police spokesman told Reuters.

Spokesman Paul Browne said the woman who filed the complaint against Strauss-Kahn, 62, was a 32-year-old chambermaid who fled the room after the incident.

Strauss-Kahn, a possible Socialist candidate in the French presidential election next April, left the hotel after the incident and boarded an Air France aircraft scheduled to depart for Paris, the police spokesman said.   

The aircraft was held at the airport and officers from the New York/New Jersey Port Authority boarded the plane to take him into custody and hand him over to New York Police Department detectives, the spokesman said.

Police said the alleged incident took place at the Sofitel hotel on West 44th Street near Times Square.
   
Strauss-Kahn, 62, took over the IMF in November 2007.  Before that, he was a member of the French National Assembly and a professor of economics at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris.

In October 2008, Strauss-Kahn apologised for "an error of judgment" in an affair with a subordinate, but denied he had abused his position.

Strauss-Kahn apologised to employees, the woman he had the affair with, Piroska Nagy, and his wife, French television personality Anne Sinclair, for the trouble it had caused. - Reuters