A Scottish charity worker dubbed the Tartan Taleban has been released from a Pakistani prison where he has apparently been held without charge for three months.

James McLintock, who is known by his Muslim name Yakub Mohammed, was freed on Friday and has since returned to his wife and family in Pakistan.

No reason has been given for his arrest, although it has been reported that he was believed to have all-Qaeda links.

Dundee-born Mr McLintock, 44, was arrested in Peshawar at the end of February. A former pupil of Lawside Academy in Dundee, he converted to Islam after dropping out of university. In the late 1980s he attended a training camp in Pakistan and later claimed in media interviews to have fought as a jihadist.

It is the second time in a decade that Mr McLintock has been imprisoned in such circumstances. He was arrested on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border on Christmas Eve 2001 but released less than a month later, again without charge. That incident led to his Tartan Taleban moniker.

He has reportedly fought with the Mujahidin in Afghanistan and with the Serbian forces in the Bosnian war. In the 1990s, he moved to Bradford, where he met and married his wife, and worked for an Islamic charity.

His mother, Margaret, has always protested his innocence, insisting that he has been working with a legitimate aid agency.

From her home in Arbroath she said she was glad he was safe but insisted that no one knew why he had been captured or by whom.

She said: “I am pleased. He is home in Pakistan. He has been grilled for 12 weeks so I'm not going to question him for another week or so.”

Mike Weir, the SNP MP for Angus, called on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to investigate the case. “They have had to be prodded all along over this matter,” he said. “I appreciate the situation in Pakistan is not fantastic at the moment but there are a lot of unanswered questions. He has been released without any charge against him.

"It is mystery why he was arrested in the first place." He said that, following his release, Mr McLintock was “apparently in reasonable spirits and had lost some weight”. However, he said, the family were “none the wiser as to why he was arrested three months ago. There was no explanation”.

And he said that the Tartan Taleban tag was "extremely unfair" as there was no evidence Mr McLintock had anything to do with the terrorist cell.

Mr Weir, who was contacted by Mr McLintock's family and asked to pursue his case for them, added: “The real problem here was lack of any information and there was no official confirmation that he was being held, where he was being held and what, if any, charge he was held on.”

The MP revealed that Mr McLintock's wife, Shaffia, had instructed lawyers to lodge a writ of habeus corpus - demanding he be released or reasons given for his detention — at the supreme court in Islamabad. He said he believed this might have spurred the authorities to let Mr McLintock go and suggested that there was still a respect for the rule of law.

The Foreign Office confirmed that Mr McLintock had been released last Friday and reunited with his family. A spokeswoman said: “We can confirm that a British national has been released from custody in Pakistan and is back at home with his wife and children. Consular officials have been in touch with the British national since his release and we will consider any request for further action that the individual may ask of us.”

She declined to respond directly to Mr Weir’s comments.

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