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MAS SELAMAT'S WIFE (centre) and children (one of them seen here on the left) were deported to Singapore from Indonesia, after he and his family were arrested in Tanjung Pinang in 2003. -- PHOTO: ST FILE PHOTO
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MALANG, EAST JAVA - ESCAPED terrorist Mas Selamat Kastari has spent almost as much of his adult life running from the law as he has plotting the mass murder of men, women and children.
When not watching the world pass him by from prison cells, he was constantly on the move, always looking over his shoulder.
'He was a quiet, unassuming man, a master of disguise,' said Adjunct Commissioner Susanto, who was a police investigator in Tanjung Pinang on Riau island in 2003.
It was in that year that he made the first of Mas Selamat's arrests in Indonesia.
From him and other Indonesians who came in contact with the terrorist, as well as from documents of police here, a portrait emerges of Mas Selamat's humdrum existence.
He first fled Singapore in December 2001, two years after he had taken over as head of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) division here.
His first stop was Thailand where he plotted to hijack a jetliner and crash it into Changi Airport.
When that plan failed to take off, he headed for Malaysia, then Indonesia, travelling from Medan in north Sumatra, to Jakarta and Bali, and finally back to east Java's capital of Surabaya in January 2002.
He was apparently intent on settling back in the country where he was born, in 1961, before his family immigrated to Singapore.
Sources said that upon arrival, he was picked up by a man he had contacted named Ayub, also known as Yazid, who had been recommended by Singaporean JI member H. Ibrahim before his own arrest.
Ayub sheltered him for two months in Sidoarjo, a neighbouring industrial town near Surabaya, while working on getting him a government-issued identification card and later a passport.
'Ayub told him to stay in the house to prevent suspicion,' said a police investigator involved in the case.
'He gave Ayub 500,000 rupiah (S$74.49) to get the fake ID card and the passport.'
Ayub remains at large. He is wanted for possession of weapons and involvement in the 2002 bombings in Bali.
After getting a passport under the name Edi Haryanto, Mas Selamat headed to Dumai, Riau, where he was reunited with his wife and five children.
They lived there for about a year. He sold soya bean milk while trying to get an Indonesian passport for his wife and birth certificates for his children.
It was not long, though, before the Indonesian police, at the request of their Singapore counterparts, tracked him down and put together an operation to nab him.
One day in February 2003, the Riau police followed him in a ferry heading for neighbouring Tanjung Pinang island.
His wife and four of his children were in the same boat but acted as if they did not know him - an apparent family security measure.
In Tanjung Pinang, his family boarded the same minivan as he, but sat far from him. All were oblivious to the fact that some of the passengers and even the driver were police officers.
When one officer feigned a robbery and takeover of the vehicle, Mas Selamat sat calmly. His face betrayed no signs of panic or fear, said Commissioner Susanto, who is now a criminal investigator with the East Java Police.
The fake robber ordered everyone to alight the minibus, including Mas Selamat, who was immediately seized by two detectives. The others nabbed his family.
'I asked him his name and he said 'Edi Haryanto',' said Senior Commissioner Syafrizal Ahiar, who headed that operation, and is now police chief of Malang.
'I said in the Malay dialect: 'No you're not, you're Mas Selamat Kastari' and he admitted that he was, just like that.'
For falsifying information in his ID, he was sentenced to 18 months in Pekanbaru prison. His wife and children were deported to Singapore.
After his release in August 2004, he went right back to prison. The Surabaya police brought him back here to east Java, where he was sentenced to another 16 months for the fake ID and passport.
After serving nine months, he was released for good behaviour. Oddly, that good conduct included receiving visits from at least three JI members.
One of them was Said Sungkar, the brother of JI co-founder Abdullah Sungkar who had been hauled in for links to the 2002 Bali bombers but was never charged with a crime.
Another man named Jauhari Ibrahim said he had been 'sent' by JI and recommended that Mas Selamat go to Malang, about a two-hour drive from Surabaya, after his release. According to police documents on his confessions, there, he was to contact a man named Heru.
After being freed in August 2005, Mas Selamat did just that.
In Malang, he asked both Heru and Sungkar to help him get an identification card and an Indonesian wife. He never did find another wife, unlike another JI fugitive, Malaysia-born Noordin, but he did secure another Indonesian ID under the name Hendrawan.
A caretaker at the Sudirman mosque in downtown Malang let him stay there. The man, named Edi Suhanis, is also a specialist in bekam or al-hijamah, a traditional treatment of sticking cups to the skin to treat various ailments.
The Sunday Times met Edi at his bekam clinic, not far from the mosque, where he practises in a discreet setting at the back of a defunct Internet kiosk owned by his nephew.
The glass door is kept locked and the rolling front door partially closed. A poster calling on Muslims to fight oppression hangs in the sparse backroom and there is a collection of books on jihad next to a computer.
Both Edi and his nephew responded cautiously to questions. The soft-spoken 46-year old denied ever knowing Mas Selamat.
'There were a lot of people staying at the mosque around that time before we started to lock the area where they slept,' he said.
But according to Mas Selamat's testimony to counter-terror police, Edi taught him the technique of cupping during his stay in Malang.
Edi also introduced him to another man who frequented the mosque, Bambang, who let him work for meals at his motorbike workshop.
Bambang Haryono lives in a cramped house in a narrow alleyway. On his front porch, he assembles motorbikes custom-made to look like Harley Davidsons for customers.
When shown a photo of Mas Selamat, Bambang, 43, admitted having helped him because he felt sorry for a 'Muslim brother', but said Mas Selamat had introduced himself as Salim.
'He asked me what I did for a living, then we started talking about motorcycles,' he said. Bambang's living room is a cramped 2-by-3 sq m space crowded with a couple of chairs and a motorcycle frame - a work in progress.
'He helped around here for some time but I swear I had no idea who he was at the time,' he said.
Bambang claimed that he found out who Mas Selamat was only much later from the newspapers.
Neighbours said Bambang had been just a local tough guy until three years ago, presumably around the time he met Mas Selamat.
After that, he cut his long hair and started to grow a goatee like many other devout Muslims in Indonesia.
There were no indications that Mas Selamat helped plan an attack during his stay in Malang.
But he was there around the same time that Malaysian bombmaker Azahari was hiding in the resort area Batu, only 10km away. Azahari was killed in a shootout during a police raid on his safe house in November 2005.
Mas Selamat, too, seemed to be running out of places to hide. Police had started tracking him again, at the request of the Singapore police.
Six members of the anti-terror squad Detachment 88 nabbed him for the third time in January 2006 at a neighbourhood mosque in Sengkaling, halfway between Malang and Batu.
A squad member said Mas Selamat was walking out of the mosque after late afternoon prayers when two officers flanked him from behind.
He walked faster but remained calm. He was not fast enough though. Another squad hiding in a van pounced on him from the front.
Mas Selamat was taken to the squad's safe house in Surabaya for interrogation. The next day, a team of Singapore police arrived and identified him. He was flown to Jakarta and then to Singapore.
The investigators who interrogated Mas Selamat in Riau and Surabaya said he answered their queries, but did not volunteer any information. But police never followed up on his tip-offs.
'Our task was to catch him and hand him over to Singapore,' said an anti-terror squad member who asked to remain anonymous.
'Frankly, they were not our priority. We have hundreds of people whom we are after and building cases against.'
But he said after Mas Selamat's escape from the Whitley Road Detention Centre on Feb 27, the police had immediately sent out warnings and orders to stay alert for him, 'but it is safe to say, he would probably not return to this area for some time'.
asmarani@sph.com.sg
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