SAO PAULO, Brazil (AP) – Brazilian police have arrested a Lebanese woman wanted for bank fraud and suspected of links to the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, officials said yesterday.

Acting on an anonymous tip, police arrested Rana Abdel Rahim Koleilat, 39, on Sunday in a furnished apartment at a hotel on the outskirts of Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, said police inspector Nicanor Nogueira Branco.

The Lebanese consul general in Sao Paulo, Joseph Sayah, said Koleilat was wanted in Lebanon for bank fraud and for questioning by the UN’s Independent International Investigation Commission into last year’s truck bombing that killed Hariri and 20 other people in downtown Beirut, according to police.

The UN commission was created by the United Nations Security Council two months soon after Hariri’s killing in February 2005.

Koleilat, who was carrying a British passport identifying her as Rana Klailat, offered police up to US$200,000 (euro168,035) to release her and was arrested for attempted bribery, Branco said.

Brazilian authorities were consulting with British officials to determine whether the passport was legitimate, Branco said. The passport said it had been issued in the Lebanese capital of Beirut by the British Embassy there in 2002, and listed Koleilat as a “British Overseas Citizen”.

Last Friday, US President George W Bush told Lebanon’s Future TV that the United States “will not turn a blind eye” to Hariri’s killing. The remarks were seen as a message to Syria, which the UN Security Council has twice accused of failing to give full assistance to the inquiry into the killing.