Singapore governments most wanted man recaptured in Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur: The alleged leader of an Islamic militant group accused of plotting to crash an airliner in Singapore has been arrested in Malaysia after more than a year on the run, authorities said.

Home Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said that Mas Selamat bin Kastari, who escaped from a high-security detention centre in Singapore by crawling through a toilet window, was being held under internal security laws.

"Mas Selamat is under our detention and is being investigated right now. He was planning something which allows us to arrest him," Hishamuddin told a news conference, without elaborating.

"We are becoming an expert on him so hopefully this time he won't escape us, and the Singaporean experience will help," he said of the Indonesian-born militant who has escaped custody several times.

Hishammuddin would not say where Mas Selamat was being held, or confirm reports in the Singapore media that he was arrested on April 1 in the southern state of Johor, which is separated from Singapore by a narrow waterway.

But Malaysian police chief Musa Hasan said he was detained early last month along with two other suspected militants in a joint operation by Singapore and Malaysian police.

"We are in contact with our counterparts (in Singapore and Indonesia) and have informed them about what we have gathered from them," he told AFP.

Mas Selamat is said to be the head of the Singapore cell of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), an underground group linked to Al-Qaeda and blamed for the 2002 Bali bombing and other bloody attacks in Southeast Asia.

Singapore officials allege he was part of a plot to hijack an airliner in Bangkok and crash it into Singapore's Changi airport -- one of Asia's busiest -- in 2001 following the September 11 attacks that year in the United States.

Now 48, he escaped from his high-security detention centre in Singapore on February 27 last year after squeezing through a toilet window that had no bars and climbing over a fence.

His escape triggered a huge manhunt, but a flood of tips from the public, some inspired by a bounty of one million Singapore dollars (647,520 US dollars) put up by two local businessmen, turned out to be false alarms.

The affair made the strict city-state an object of ridicule and triggered a sweeping review of security measures.

Singapore Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan SengWong Kan Seng told broadcaster Channel NewsAsia that after his escape Mas Selamat swam across the Johor Strait that separates the two countries using an improvised flotation device.

"Singaporeans must not think that just because Mas Selamat is arrested and now in Malaysia, the threat of terrorism will not be there anymore," he said.

Mas Selamat had not been formally charged at the time of his escape, and was being held under Singapore's Internal Security Act which -- like the Malaysian equivalent -- allows for detention without trial.

He had fled Singapore in December 2001 after a security operation against Jemaah Islamiyah but was arrested in Indonesia in 2006 and handed back.

"He is an extremely skilled and dangerous terrorist and the fact that he has been recaptured improves the security situation in Singapore and the region," said John HarrisJohn Harrison, a security analyst at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University.

"This is irrespective of what he may or may not have been able to accomplish during his escape," he told AFP.

Sidney Jones, an analyst with the International Crisis Group, applauded the arrest, but said it did not erase the threat posed by regional militants.

"In some ways the bigger danger will still come from the people at large," she told AFP from Jakarta.

"I think we've got a number of little splinters. I don't think this arrest will change their strategies."