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Tuesday, March 04, 2008

Should we be worried?

Mas Selamat Kastari is Singapore's most wanted terror fugitive who escaped for the third time on 27 February 2008 from detention under the country's Internal Security Act and was allegedly the head of the Singapore branch of militant group Jemaah Islamiah (JI).
Post-9/11, Singapore authorities discovered that he planned to crash seven bomb-filled trucks at various locations around city-state, and he had been on the run ever since. In January 2006, Mas Selamat was arrested by Indonesian anti-terror squads in Java and deported to Singapore. He was suspected of plotting to bomb Singapore Changi Airport in 2002, and further investigations confirmed that he had initially planned to do so by crashing a plane through the airport.

The detention center that he was being held at is about 5 minutes from where we are living. I hope he isn't hanging around close by. There are so many areas that are totally jungle, he could be hiding out in any of them. A massive manhunt comprising personnel from the Singapore Police Force, the Gurkha Contingent, the Police Tactical Unit and the Police National Service Key Installation Protection Unit were deployed in the vicinity of the area immediately after the escape. They were later aided by members of the Singapore Guards, before the operation was wound down over 17 hours later without success in locating the fugitive, who was believed to be unarmed. Last week we had to go up to daughter no. 2's school which is near the north island bridge that goes to Malaysia. Traffic was so backed up due to the extra security at the immigration check point. I think all inmates should be injected with some sort of tiny GPS tracking device (while they are unconscious so they don't know where it was injected - or that they were injected).


To help all of us help those searching for Selamat, we have been given the following card to keep in our wallets:


Wanted posters of Mas Selamat were put up in shopping centers, bus and train stations islandwide to appeal for the public to inform Police should they spot him, and leaflets given out by volunteers to members of the Public. All mobile phone service providers in Singapore sent out free Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) messages on 1 March 2008 to all 5.5 million subscribers (none of us got the MMS message) with Mas Selamat's photograph.

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