KUALA LUMPUR, June 4: Malaysian police have arrested a Pakistani national and launched a manhunt for four others alleged to have kidnapped and tortured a South African diplomat, a senior police official said on Friday.

Aziz Bulat, chief of the city's criminal investigation department, said that the Pakistani, who is married to a local, was detained on Wednesday. "We are questioning him on the motive of the kidnapping. We have also obtained the identity of four other accomplices. We are hunting them down. We urge them to surrender," he said.

Deputy High Commissioner Nicky Scholtz, 54, was walking along a street near his hotel in the centre of Kuala Lumpur on May 23 when he was forced into a car and "violently abducted", the South African embassy in Kuala Lumpur had said.

Mr Scholtz, a bachelor who arrived in Malaysia last month, was the victim of "what appears to have been a random attack on the mistaken assumption that he was a solitary foreign tourist", the embassy said.

He was "subsequently confined with the purpose of brutally extorting money from him - at times threatened with a knife, bound with wire cables, repeatedly tortured and on more than one occasion his captors threatened to kill him".

He was released last Sunday under threat of death on condition that he would leave Malaysia without reporting his experiences. Mr Bulat said Scholtz was still in Malaysia and would be asked to identify the Pakistani suspect.

The kidnappers "extorted" 16,000 ringgit ($4,200) from him, the embassy said, without giving details of how this was done. Local media have said some of the money was withdrawn on his credit cards. At the time of Scholtz's disappearance, Malaysian police had discounted the possibility that he had been kidnapped. -AFP