27 February 2009 : AFP
By Bernice Han
Singapore - An alleged Islamic militant leader suspected of plotting to crash an airliner into Singapore's Changi airport remains at large one year after his escape from detention, the government said Friday.
"The search for Mas Selamat Kastari is still ongoing and it will not stop until he is apprehended whether in Singapore or overseas," a spokesman for the ministry of home affairs, in charge of internal security, told AFP.
The Singaporean Muslim's escape on February 27, 2008 through a toilet window in a detention centre made the city-state, better known for authoritarian rule, an object of ridicule and triggered a sweeping review of security measures.
Kastari was said to be part of the Singapore cell of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), an underground group blamed for the 2002 Bali bombing and other bloody attacks in Southeast Asia.
Kastari, now 48, was accused by Singapore authorities of involvement in a plot to hijack a passenger jet in Bangkok and crash it into Changi, one of Asia's busiest airports, in 2001.
He was turned over to Singapore custody after being captured a second time in 2006 while on the run in Indonesia.
At the time of his escape, no formal charges had been filed against Kastari, who was being held under a law that allows for detention without trial.
A flood of tips from the public, some inspired by a cash bounty of one million Singapore dollars (647,520 US dollars) put up by two local businessmen, turned out to be nothing but false alarms.
"Well, the search was pretty thorough and it went on for some months last year," Tim Huxley, executive director in Asia with the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told AFP.
"It is probable he is outside Singapore now... It seems obvious if he is out, he is probably in a large regional country like Philippines or Indonesia where there is a JI network to hide him," he said.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong insists Kastari will be recaptured.
"We don't know. He could be here, he could be overseas," Lee told a forum of foreign correspondents in December when asked if the government knew where the fugitive was.
"One day we will catch him."
Security analyst John Harrison from Singapore's International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research suggested it would be difficult to find Kastari but "that does not mean that he will never be captured."
"Remember he is a vicious terrorist who is well schooled in the art of escape and evasion... he is now putting those skills to use," he said.
A government investigation found that moments before he escaped, Kastari asked for a toilet break before meeting visiting relatives in the Whitley Road Detention Centre, just 10 minutes by car from the Orchard Road shopping belt.
As his guards waited outside the door, he squeezed through a window without any grills and climbed over the detention centre's fence. There were no surveillance cameras monitoring the area.
Nine officers and guards were penalised for lapses that allowed Kastari to escape. Two of them were sacked and three demoted, but calls for a higher-level shakeup were ignored by the government. - AFP
