East Timor’s former interior minister was put under house arrest yesterday for allegedly distributing weapons to a group whose leader has said he was ordered to assassinate political opponents of the country’s embattled prime minister, Mari Alkatiri.

The move to detain Rogerio Lobato, a senior official in Mr Alkatiri’s ruling Fretilin party, came as John Bolton, US ambassador to the United Nations, said he opposed deploying UN peacekeepers to East Timor because the crisis there appeared to be an internal one.