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Former IMF leader Dominique Strauss-Kahn left his temporary residence in Tribeca on Saturday.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s accuser was told he checked out before she went to clean his hotel room, leading investigators to doubt a setup, sources said.
“Nothing has been raised to indicate that she was targeting him,” said a source close to the investigation, shooting down suggestions the Sofitel maid set out to entrap the powerful French pol.
Prosecutors eyed a possible shakedown from the start, but uncovered enough independent evidence to back the woman’s story.
“There was a lot of reason to believe what she was telling us,” the source said. “There were other [hotel] staffers who independently corroborated her actions and motions that day.
“One of the hotel employees who had just cleared some room service trays said he told her the room was empty just before she went inside,” the source said.
Card key evidence showed the maid had gone into the room next to Strauss-Kahn’s at 10:30 a.m., 11 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. on May 14. At 12:06 p.m., the maid entered his suite for the first time.
Strauss-Kahn checked out of the hotel at 12:28 p.m. in a hurry. The woman returned to the suite with a supervisor at 12:30 p.m.
All that, coupled with DNA evidence indicating a sexual liaison, seemed to make a strong case.”It was rare to have so much corroboration on a sex crime,” the source said.
The case began to unravel when it emerged the woman – an immigrant from Guinea – had lied on her asylum application.
Even more damning was a tape-recorded phone call after Strauss-Kahn’s arrest in which she and a man in an Arizona immigration jail discussed a payday.
It emerged that the man, held after a drug bust involving 400 pounds of pot, had funneled $100,000 into her bank accounts.
She had five cell phones in her name that the man, a Gambian immigrant, and his cohorts used.
The revelations led a judge to release Strauss-Kahn from house arrest, although prosecutors have declined to drop charges, saying there is still evidence of an assault.
A French newspaper reported that the man in immigration detention is the victim’s second husband and that the pair married in a religious ceremony a year ago.
“She told us that he was imprisoned for immigration problems, for illegal working papers,” a relative told Journal du Dimanche. “She never talked of dealings with drugs.”
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. has been fending off criticism that his office mishandled the case or pushed too quickly for an indictment.
With Linda Hervieux in Paris
lalpert@nydailynews.com
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