NEW YORK. Nov 27: In a forensic report published by the New York Review of Books last week, veteran investigative journalist Edward Espstein said Mr Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF chief, was the victim of a conspiracy to “destroy him as a political force” by getting him convicted of the rape of a 32-year-old chambermaid in his suite, a newspaper reported said on Sunday.

Epstein claims Mr Strauss-Kahn’s BlackBerry had been hacked and that staff at the Sofitel hotel were filmed performing a three-minute “dance of celebration” and “high-fiving” as they celebrated just before Mr Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, the Daily Telegraph said in the report.

But Accor Group, the French company which owns the Sofitel, firmly rebuffed Epstein’s conspiracy theory, with its ex-director of security describing it as “absolute fantasy”.

Accor said in a statement that the three-minute dance of celebration “in fact lasted eight seconds, with both employees filmed on CCTV categorically denying that their exchange had any connection whatsoever with Mr Strauss-Kahn”.

The Sofitel had been accused of not identifying the occupant of room 2820, close to Strauss-Kahn’s presidential suite 2806.

According to Epstein, hotel key-card records show Nafissatou Diallo, the maid, was in room 2820 with a mystery man immediately before and after her sexual encounter with Mr Strauss Kahn, suggesting he might have been an accomplice.

But Accor said records showed the unnamed man in room 2820 had checked out before Miss Diallo started cleaning his room, and that she simply returned to pick up her cleaning trolley. She never met the “mystery” occupant.

Meanwhile, one of Miss Diallo’s lawyers said that she was not savvy enough to have been part of a complex plot by the French government.

“You have to know Miss Diallo to know how absurd this is,” Douglas Wigdor told the Telegraph. “She is a very unsophisticated woman. To say she is part of a political conspiracy is ridiculous”.