AP - Friday, February 29
SINGAPORE - The Singapore government apologized Thursday for a
rare security lapse after an alleged Islamic terror leader escaped
from jail, triggering a massive manhunt across the island nation
for a man who walks with a limp.
Authorities said Mas Selamat Kastari, who once allegedly plotted
to hijack a plane and crash it into Singapore's international
Changi airport, slipped away from a detention center Wednesday. Mas
Selamat is said to be commander of the al-Qaida-linked Jemaah
Islamiyah's Singapore arm.
Minister of Home Affairs Wong Kan Seng said Mas Selamat escaped
after being taken from his cell to go to a room to wait for his
family who were scheduled for a visit.
Mas Selamat, 47, was granted permission to visit the washroom
and then escaped, Wong said in Parliament.
"This should never have happened," said Wong, who is also the
deputy prime minister. "I am sorry that it had. An independent
investigation is under way and we should not speculate on what and
how it happened."
Security breaches are virtually unheard of in Singapore, a small
and densely populated island whose sophisticated intelligence
system has been liberally used to ensure order and safety.
Among its biggest success was pre-empting alleged plots to bomb
the U.S. Embassy, the American Club and government buildings in
2001 _ schemes in which Mas Selamat allegedly had a hand.
Singapore, a close ally of the United States, was named an
al-Qaida target in a transcript from alleged al-Qaida operative
Khalid Sheikh Mohamed's Combatant Status Review Tribunal, held last
year at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba.
The Home Affairs Ministry said in a statement that Mas Selamat
fled the Whitley Road Detention Center in a wooded residential area
in central Singapore. It said he walks with a limp.
"Extensive police resources have been deployed to track him
down," the statement said. Mas Selamat was not known to be armed,
but Wong said he was a security threat.
A security blockade spread out around the detention center. The
facility _ guarded by elite Nepalese Gurkha guards _ is enclosed by
high fences topped with barbed wire. It has closed-circuit
television surveillance cameras around its perimeter.
Thousands of police officers and military personnel set up
roadblocks to check passing cars. Dozens of riot police and
military trucks parked along main roads.
The Gurkhas fanned out in the snake-infested forest nearby,
checking vacant bungalows and peering down drains and back alleys
of private housing estates.
Students arriving for class at a nearby girls' school were
ushered through the gates by teachers and parents to an assembly
hall where a school official told them "not to roam around."
Security was tightened at the city-state's land, air and sea
entry ports, Wong said.
It takes less than an hour to drive from one end of Singapore to
the other. The affluent, highly modernized Southeast Asian country
is only a short boat ride from Indonesia and Malaysia.
Indonesian security officials said they would work with
Singapore to prepare for the likelihood that Mas Selamat might
attempt to come over.
Mas Selamat "would think Indonesia is the safest place" where it
would likely be easier to hide, said Nasir Abbas, a former Jemaah
Islamiyah operative who now works closely with Indonesian
police.
Malaysia's police chief Musa Hassan said his forces were on the
lookout and have informed border authorities, but have made no
other special arrangements to tighten border security.
"We have not received any special request from Singapore as
yet," Musa said. "We have not sighted him yet."
Singapore's Home Affairs ministry said Mas Selamat's plane
hijack plot was in retaliation for the country's arrest and
detention of some of his fellow Jemaah Islamiyah members in a
crackdown on the militant group's operatives here.
The alleged schemes were never carried out.
Mas Selamat fled Singapore in December 2001 following the
arrests of 13 other suspected Jemaah Islamiyah members.
The ministry's Web site said Indonesian authorities detained him
in February 2003 on charges related to possession of falsified
identification documents. They deported him to Singapore in
February 2006, the ministry said.
Mas Selamat, said to be a father of four, had since been held in
custody under Singapore's Internal Security Act that allows
indefinite detention without trial.
Since 2002, Jemaah Islamiyah has been blamed for a series of
terror attacks that have killed more than 250 people, most of them
in Indonesia. Scores of its suspected operatives have been arrested
across Southeast Asia since 2000.
