Mr Robert McBride, a former African National Congress guerrilla and a suspended official of the South African Department of Foreign Affairs, was provisionally released from prison in Mozambique yesterday after being held for more than six months, much of it before he was charged in court.
Mr McBride is descended from Maj John McBride, an Irish volunteer in the Anglo-Boer War who was father of the late Sean MacBride.
Mr McBride was released on the orders of Judge Joao Carlos Trindade of the Supreme Court because the legal time limit for detention had expired. The release was subject to one condition: Mr McBride gave an undertaking to return to Mozambique if necessary.
Mr McBride is hated by many white South Africans for his role in a car-bomb explosion in the mid-1980s which claimed the lives of three innocent women, but is admired by many black South Africans for his contribution to the armed struggle.
He was arrested on March 9th on suspicion of gun-running. Throughout his time in prison, Mr McBride and his wife, Paula, have proclaimed his innocence, insisting that he had been framed by political enemies from the old order in South Africa still occupying senior positions in the police.
One senior officer even stated after a visit to Mozambique that the authorities there had garnered enough evidence against Mr McBride to "put him behind bars for a long time" in South Africa.
Mr McBride - who was travelling on a diplomatic passport at the time of his arrest, but who was not on an official assignment - insisted that he was investigating gun-running in Mozambique and, in particular, whether an alleged gun smuggler in that country was supplying arms to South African bandits who had carried out a series of spectacular heists in the previous six months.