Rumours of Flaifel's return rife in Bahrain

Speculations have gripped Bahrain last night that a fugitive former security officer have returned to the Kingdom from Australia, where he had fled to over 5 month ago.

However, there was no official confirmation for Flaifel's return by midnight. Colonel Adel Flaifel, a controversial former officer in the now-disbanded State Security Service, had fled the country on May 3 whilst an investigation committee, commissioned by the Royal Court, was looking into complaints by 9 businessmen claiming that he had blackmailed them into paying him over $ 56 million when he was second-in-command in the force.

Others accused him of torturing political detainees during Bahrain's years of civil unrest in the mid 1990s. Sources in the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights (BCHR) told Gulf News that Flaifel "may have returned home around 7pm" yesterday.

Other sources, close to the case, declined to confirm the news. "We will not certainly know in the next 24 hours," BCHR sources said. The sources added that a new law, issued by a Royal decree late last month, granting pardon to all alleged crimes committed before November 1 this year, "was the reason he decided to come back."

Flaifel has been living in Australia since May. He is said to have bought several luxurious real estate properties, worth more than $ 50 million. Following his fleeing, a man claiming to be Flaifel himself called Gulf News office in Dubai saying that "I left the country in an ordinary trip to Europe." However, the mobile number the person gave to Gulf News staff to call him back was found to be one in Australia.