Singapore detains five Islamic militants-ministry

SINGAPORE, June 8 (Reuters) Singapore has arrested five Islamic militants since late in 2006, including four members of Jemaah Islamiah (JI), a Southeast Asian militant group linked to al Qaeda, the Home Ministry said today.

The ministry said in a statement that in February the Internal Security Department (ISD) had arrested and subsequently detained Singaporean national Abdul Basheer, 28, who it said had made specific plans to pursue ''militant jihad'' in Afghanistan.

It described him as ''self-radicalised, independent of direct recruitment by established terrorist groups''.

''His views were shaped by the radical discourse that he avidly looked up on the Internet,'' the ministry said in a statement on its Web site.

The ministry also said that between November 2006 and April 2007, four Singaporean JI members had been detained.

It said one of them -- Ishak Mohamed Noohu -- was a senior member of the Singapore JI network and had been part of a team that had planned to hijack an airplane in order to crash it into Singapore's Changi Airport.

Under Singapore's Internal Security Act, authorities can detain suspects indefinitely without immediate public notice of the arrests.

The ministry said Ishak and the three other JI members had left Singapore just before or after a December 2001 security operation against the JI network, while Abdul Basheer had left Singapore in October 2006.

It did not say whether the five men were arrested in Singapore or abroad.

The ministry also said five other JI detainees were released on June 1. Four of those men had been detained since September 2002. One had been detained since February 2007.

''They had cooperated with ISD on investigations into the JI, and had responded positively to rehabilitation. They are assessed to no longer pose a security threat to Singapore that warrants preventive detention,'' the ministry said.

The Home Affairs ministry said in September it was holding 34 suspected Muslim militants in detention under internal security laws, which allow for indefinite detention without trial. The ministry did not detail how many militants are currently being held, following the five new arrests and the five releases.

At the ministry, nobody was available for comment.

Singapore, a staunch US ally and a major base for Western business, sees itself as a prime terrorism target in the region after it foiled plots in 2001 by the Jemaah Islamiah group to attack its airport and various Western-linked sites, including the US embassy.

REUTERS SBC RK2236