Former French interior minister Pasqua dies at 88

Former French interior minister Charles Pasqua died in a hospital in the Paris suburbs Monday at age 88.

Charles Pasqua, seen here October 1986 when he first became France's interior minister AFP

The close ally of former president Jacques Chirac was interior minister from 1986 to 1988 and 1993 to 1995.

Known for his tough stances on immigration and crime, Pasqua earned a reputation as a no-nonsense politician with a hard-line immigration law bearing his name, but his career was overshadowed by funding scandals.

In 2009 a French court confirmed a guilty verdict for the illegal funding of his 1999 European Union parliament campaign, and a year later he was handed a one-year suspended sentence for misappropriation of public funds to benefit arms export company Sofremi, which was overseen by the interior ministry.

At the time of his death, Pasqua was also appealing a two-year suspended sentence and 150,000-euro fine for misappropriation of public funds in connection with a project to establish an art foundation.

He was cleared however in a case involving the alleged sale of contraband arms to Angola, and of UN corruption charges in connection with Iraq's oil-for-food programme.

Pasqua spent more than half a century in politics, serving in the European Parliament before he was re-elected to the French Senate in 2004, where he served until 2011.

He was a mentor to former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who said in a statement that Pasqua was "one of France's greatest servants."

Prime Minister Manuel Valls wrote on Twitter that with an “original voice and sometimes controversial, Charles Pasqua embodied a certain idea of France".