French Foreign Minister Michele Alliot-Marie, who has been under fire on her year-end vacation in Tunisia, will announce her resignation on Sunday, local media reported on Saturday, but the minister, who is on a foreign visit, refused to confirm the report.

Since January, the minister has been suffering a battery of blames with her controversial relations with the former Tunisian authority under the ousted president Ben Ali. Several local media in the last two days said she would surrender to the overwhelming pressure on Sunday or Monday.

French media on Saturday quoted different sources related to the cabinet as saying that the beleaguered minister is to announce her quit on Sunday after returning from Kuwait, where she was joining in celebrations of the country's 50th anniversary of independence. This could be her last mission as the French foreign minister in President Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet.

Alliot-Marie bore the first hit in late January when she blundered in public about sending policing equipment to aid the former Tunisian authority against increasing protests, which eventually led to the ouster of exiled president Ben Ali.

Later on, local media disclosed that the minister and her family accepted an invitation from one Tunisian tycoon, who was reportedly in Ben Ali's camp, and spent Christmas holidays in Tunisia right before the political crisis there reached the peak.

However, the minister declined to comment on the report while inquired by the press in Kuwait, only stating that so far she is still "one hundred percent committed" as foreign minister.

Local media reports also speculated that Defense Minister Alain Juppe would probably take over as the new foreign minister.

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