Who let the terrorist out?

The customs officials on the Johor Baru side must be smiling ear to ear. For the first time in years, they don't have to do a thorough check on the cars coming in. Why? Policemen on the Singapore side are doing their job for them, methodically searching every car, trying to catch the escaped terrorist Mas Selamat.

After "Toilet Break", as the Singapore satirical website Talkingcock.com termed the escape, we have heard many a joke about it. Talkingcock.com put up their own picture of the different possible disguises that the terrorist could have adorned, including one of him wearing a blonde wig.

But the escape of a hobbling prisoner has a "Usual Suspects" insidious feel to it. In that movie, the protagonist is an evil convict named Keyser Soze, who is a legend in the underworld. Kevin Spacey's character is actually Keyser, but he hides this by pretending to be an incompetent thief who walks with a limp, fooling all those around him.

The ease of the break (Mas Selamat said he had to use the toilet and climbed out the window) and the slim chance of ever escaping from detention (when is the last time you heard about anybody escaping from detention in Singapore?) has spawned several conspiracy theories:

1) One of the more popular ones is that the Singapore government negotiated a prisoner exchange with JI

2) Or that Singapore has passed Mas Selamat onto, say, the US, which is now happily torturing him in some place like Syria

3) Another is the theory that the prisoner is already dead, having been accidentally killed in interrogation…with the "escape" just planned so that they would have an excuse for the death.

4) A fourth is that the authorities let him get away just so that he would unwittingly lead them back to a bigger fish in the JI network

OTBM thought about all these for a while. Our opinion? Well, it is just impossible that there is any conspiracy involved. If there was some conspiracy involved, the government-owned media channels would never have carried any story. It would have been all hush-hush, and Mas Selamat Kastari would have passed quickly into the forgotten annals of time. The very fact that the story was splashed all over our media means he must really have escaped. Why?

1) First, the external credibility hit—our government lauds Singapore as a safe investment destination, and this just goes against that. Why would they fake a story now and damage foreign-investor confidence in the country?

What’s more, this might have the effect of emboldening terrorists who once thought Singapore's record on safety and police force infallible. If they can make such a simple mistake, would they be prone to others? Is Singapore's police force just resting on its image? Have they been tested recently?

2) Second, the internal credibility hit—the Singaporean public is upset about this, and already bloggers are making the link between our sky-high ministerial salaries and their inability to guarantee our internal security.

3) Third, Singapore would never deal with terrorists or any terrorist organization, throwing out the whole prisoner-exchange thesis. We didn't think that our police force would be sophisticated enough to do it even if they rationalised that the cost in terms of setting a dangerous precedent was worth paying.

And that is that really. Mas Selamat escaped due to a simple, silly mistake. It would be laughable had he been a parking offender, but he is a danger to the public, not only in Singapore but in Southeast Asia, so it is no laughing matter. The question is, who should pay the price? In many other countries, whoever was in charge would probably have been on the way out by now, but that is not the Singapore way.