A SAUDI Arabian with close connections to Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the desert kingdom’s defence minister, was among five people who were arrested in Malawi on suspicion of channelling money to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network.

The five are believed to have been on a CIA watch list since the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which more than 200 people died and thousands more were injured.

The men were arrested two weeks ago in an early-morning operation carried out in Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial centre, involving the country’s National Intelligence Bureau and the CIA.

Two days later they were deported in defiance of an order by a high court judge who had instructed the authorities to bring them to court instead.

They are believed to have been flown on a charter aircraft to another African country en route for Guantanamo Bay in Cuba or to another American detention centre.

The Saudi, who was named as Fahad Ral Bahli, is a director of Prince Sultan’s Special Committee for Relief, a charity set up by the minister which has offices in a number of African countries.

The other detainees were two Turks, a Kenyan and a Sudanese.

The organisation’s Malawi office, based in Limbe, was registered in March last year when Dr Faisal bin Jafar Bali, the manager of religious affairs in the Saudi army and who has the rank of major-general, was nominated as chairman. He also chairs the charitable committees in Mali and Nigeria. Another of the directors is a Saudi colonel.

Nobody at the Saudi embassy in London was available for comment.

The other four men, all of whom lived in Blantyre, have been identified as Ibrahim Itabaci, the Turkish executive director of the Bedir international school; Arif Ulusam, owner of the Istanbul takeaway restaurant; Mahmud Sardar Issa, a Sudanese director of the Islamic Zakaat Fund and Khalifa Abdi Hassan, a Kenyan teacher at the Blantyre Islamic Mission.

Three of the five detainees are also said to be connected to Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, an Al-Qaeda operative and leading suspect in last November’s attacks on an aircraft and an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, and the 1998 Nairobi attack.

According to local reports, President George W Bush called Bakili Muluzi, Malawi’s president, on the day of the arrests and spoke to him for seven minutes.

“The president assured Bush that Malawi would continue to help in the fight against terrorism,” said one source in Malawi.

“That is the reason why Muluzi agreed to have the five suspected Al-Qaeda suspects flown out of the country despite the case being in the High Court.”

The deportations prompted violence by some Muslims, who make up 20% of Malawi’s 11m people. Rioters burnt and looted seven churches and also ransacked the offices of Save the Children USA.

Police opened fire on a demonstration last Monday, injuring several people. Yesterday hundreds of protesters threatened to disrupt elections if the suspects were not returned.

Noel Chalamanda, a lawyer acting for some of the suspects, attacked the move. “If government officials acted against the orders of the court, they should have answered for their contempt,” he said.

“The government should not be in the forefront of defying court orders.”

Amnesty International accused America of ignoring human rights. “Once again, it seems that the US may have been involved in a transfer which circumvents basic human rights protection and national law,” it said.

“The US authorities must make public what they know about the whereabouts of these five men.”

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