Salah Abdallah Gosh, director of the national security and intelligence service in Khartoum, obtained a British visa even though a United Nations panel has recommended that he and 16 other officials be banned from travelling abroad.

Gosh returned home on Thursday. The Sudanese embassy gave no details of his medical condition.

In Darfur, 1.7m people have been forced from their homes and at least 180,000 have been killed in what the UN describes as one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

Black insurgents began a rebellion against the Khartoum government in 2003. The Sudanese government launched bloody state reprisals with the help of Arab Janjaweed militias who have murdered, raped and robbed the black population.

The UN panel recommends that Gosh and two other Sudanese officials — Elzubier Bashir Taha, the interior minister, and Abdel Rahim Mohamed Hussein, the defence minister — be charged with war crimes.

It says in an annexe to its report that Gosh failed to “neutralise and disarm non-state armed militia groups in Darfur” and could face criminal charges because he bore “command responsibility for acts of arbitrary detention, harassment (and) torture”.

The panel has recommended freezing overseas assets such as bank accounts belonging to all 17 people on its list.

Omar Hassan Ahmed el-Bashir, the Sudanese president, and Idriss Deby, his contemporary in neighbouring Chad, appear on a secondary list of five individuals being considered for future sanctions.

Gosh is close to el-Bashir and, according to exiled opponents, may have been involved in other notorious security operations.

Gosh has close links with the CIA, which regards him as an ally in the war on terror. The agency flew him to Virginia last April to discuss intelligence on Al-Qaeda but the trip provoked disquiet in Congress and the State Department and embarrassed President Bush, who has called the Sudanese government’s actions in Darfur “genocide”.

The British government’s willingness to allow Gosh into the country has astonished critics of the Sudanese regime.

“Mr Gosh has had treatment while thousands are dying and getting access to no medical treatment at all,” said Malcolm Bruce, the Liberal Democrat chairman of the Commons select committee on international development.

Dr James Smith, chief executive of the Aegis Trust, which campaigns on genocide, said: “A permanent member of the security council (such as Britain) should not disregard UN committees that we helped to set up in the first place.”

The security council has delayed ratifying the panel’s recommendations until a shambolic international peacekeeping effort in Sudan is resolved. The African Union has a 7,000-strong force in Darfur but it has been dogged by logistical problems.

At a meeting in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, on Friday, the AU said it would consider handing over responsibility to the UN at the end of the year. But Sudan is opposed to any UN intervention without a peace treaty.

Last month Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, appeared to take a tough line on Sudan.

Speaking in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, which is hosting peace talks for Darfur, he said: “The international community is not going to allow those individuals who are responsible for gross human rights violations or blocking the peace process to escape the consequences of their actions.”

But a Foreign Office spokesman said this weekend that while Gosh’s status remained uncertain, there was no reason to ban him from travelling to Britain.

“We can confirm he recently visited London,” the spokesman said. “We knew about it and did not seek to stop it because he had genuine medical reasons and he has not been charged with any crime, and I can’t speculate whether he will be.

“We must remember that we do need to maintain a relationship with senior Sudanese officials to take forward the peace process and he happens to be one of the key senior officials.”

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