The 18-year-old Protestant, arrested last month, was planning to attack two mosques in Singapore on the anniversary of Christchurch massacre.
SINGAPORE — A teenager in Singapore has been detained under the country’s strict Internal Security Act (ISA) for plotting to kill Muslims in two mosques on the March 15 anniversary of the deadly 2019 Christchurch attacks, the government said on Wednesday.
identified as Nick Lee,18, student in singapore, is a Protestant Christian of Indian ethnicity, is the youngest to be detained under such laws, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MOHA) said in a statement, adding that the teenager, who was inspired by “far-right extremist ideology”, was detained last month.
“A secondary school student at the time, he was found to have made detailed plans and preparations to conduct terrorist attacks using a machete against Muslims at two mosques in Singapore,” the ministry said.
The ISA law allows for detention without trial.
The teenager, had mapped out his route and chosen Assyafaah Mosque and Yusof Ishak Mosque as his targets near his home in northern Singapore, the ministry said, adding that he also had the intention of live-streaming his planned attack.
“He was self-radicalised, motivated by a strong antipathy towards Islam and a fascination with violence.
“He had also watched Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) propaganda videos, and came to the erroneous conclusion that ISIS represented Islam, and that Islam called on its followers to kill non-believers,” the statement said referring to the ISIL group.
The ministry said the teen was clearly influenced by Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant who shot dead 51 Muslims attending Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand on March 15, 2019. He had also streamed the shooting live on Facebook.
Tarrant was sentenced to life imprisonment without parole last year in August.
The MOHA said in the statement that the teenager admitted during the investigation that he could only “foresee two outcomes to his plan – that he is arrested before he is able to carry out the attacks, or he executes the plan and is thereafter killed by the police”.
“He went in fully prepared, knowing that he is going to die, and he was prepared to die,” Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam was quoted as saying by local media.
Source: Al Jazeera and news agencies
An 18-year-old Singapore student who was radicalised by violent far-right extremism online and who idolised the gunman behind deadly attacks on two mosques in New Zealand has been detained under the Internal Security Act, the government said.
Identified as Nick Lee, 18, he allegedly planned an attack mirroring the one carried out by white supremacist Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand six years ago, reports AFP.
Tarrant went on a rampage, killing 51 worshippers at mosques around Christchurch in March 2019 in the country’s deadliest modern-day mass shooting.
“Lee aspired to carry out attacks against Muslims in Singapore with like-minded far-right individuals that he conversed with online,” Singapore’s Internal Security Department (ISD) said.
The department said “his attack aspirations included conducting a Tarrant-style attack on Muslims at a mosque in Singapore, using homemade guns, knives, and Molotov cocktails”, and livestreaming the event, similar to the Tarrant attack.
The ISD said it issued a detention order for Lee in December under the Internal Security Act, which allows for a person to be held without trial.
Lee “started forming an antipathy towards Muslims in 2023” after coming across far-right propaganda against Muslims on social media, according to the ISD.
He searched for Tarrant’s livestreamed video of the New Zealand attacks and watched it repeatedly, the law agency added.
“He idolised Tarrant, started role-playing as Tarrant in a violent online simulation game,” it said.
Lee downloaded “video game modifications so he could pretend to be Tarrant killing Muslims at the Al-Noor Mosque in Christchurch”.
The ISD said that Lee “identified as an ‘East Asian supremacist’, believing in the superiority of Chinese, Korean and Japanese ethnicities”, after coming across these ideas online. Lee’s “attack ideations were aspirational and he had no timeline to carry them out”, the ISD said, adding that investigations into his online contacts “have not surfaced any imminent threat to Singapore”.
Wealthy Singapore, a largely ethnic Chinese society with substantial Malay Muslim and Indian minorities, has taken a tough stance against extremist ideas.
A government report on terrorism threats released in July said “youth radicalisation is a particular concern”, with 13 of the 52 cases of “self-radicalised” individuals identified by the security agency were aged 20 or younger.
The youngest was a 14-year-old detained last year. The ISD also arrested a 17-year-old in 2024, saying he was “weeks away” from planning an attack on non-Muslims, using scissors. In 2023 an 18-year-old student was detained for planning a similar attack. — With inputs fromagencies