SINGAPORE: Singapore said on Friday it has detained a 44-year-old Australia-based Singaporean who allegedly glorified the Daesh group and backed the establishment of a caliphate in the city-state.
Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff is being held under the Internal Security Act (ISA), which allows for detention without trial, for being a threat to national security, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) said in a statement.
“Zulfikar has made use of social media to propagate and spread his radical messages,” the MHA said in announcing his arrest this month.
His posts led to the radicalization of two other Singaporeans, a businessman and a security guard, the ministry said.
Zulfikar, an activist, moved to Australia with his family in 2002. It was still unclear why he returned to Singapore.
A commentary Zulfikar wrote for Singapore’s Straits Times newspaper in May described him as a final year doctorate student at the La Trobe University in Australia.
Zulfikar had also been supportive of terror groups like Al-Qaeda and its Southeast Asian affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah, according to MHA.
In Australia, he joined the hard-line Hizbut Tahrir group while keeping in contact with radical preachers and making “numerous Facebook postings glorifying and promoting ISIS (Daesh),” MHA added.
He set up a Facebook page called Al-Makhazin Singapore, which he used as a platform to “agitate on Muslim issues” in the city-state with a “real agenda” to replace the government with an Islamic state.
“He believes that violence should be used to achieve this goal if necessary,” MHA said.
“In view of the high level of terrorism threat that Singapore currently faces, and the global terrorism threat posed by ISIS, Zulfikar’s promotion of violence and ISIS and his radicalising influence pose a security threat to Singapore,” it added.
Following recent terror strikes worldwide, Singapore’s leaders have renewed warnings that an attack on the country, a staunch US defense partner, is not a matter of if but when.
Terrorism analyst Mohamad Nawab Mohamed Osman at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies said Zulfikar had “crossed the line” in his campaign for Muslim rights.
Singapore detains man who ‘glorified’ Daesh
Singapore detains man who ‘glorified’ Daesh
French court slashes jails term for trio over 2020 teacher beheading
- Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years
PARIS, France: A French court on Monday reduced on appeal the jail sentences of three men convicted over the 2020 terrorist beheading of a teacher who showed a class cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
Samuel Paty, 47, was murdered in October 2020 by an 18-year-old radical Islamist of Chechen origin in an act that horrified France.
His attacker, Abdoullakh Anzorov, was killed in a shootout with police.
Two friends of Anzorov, French national Naim Boudaoud and Azim Epsirkhanov, a Russian of Chechen origin, had their sentences of 16 years in prison reduced to six and seven years respectively by a Paris court of appeal.
Both were accused of having driven Anzorov and helping him to procure weapons before the beheading.
Brahim Chnina, the Moroccan father of a girl who falsely claimed that Paty had asked Muslim students to leave his classroom before showing the caricatures, had his 13-year sentence reduced to 10 years.
His daughter, then aged 13, was not actually in the classroom at the time and during the first trial apologized to the teacher’s family.
The court however left the 15-year term for French-Moroccan Islamist activist Abdelhakim Sefrioui untouched.
The quartet were among the seven men and one woman found guilty in 2024 of contributing to the climate of hatred that led to the beheading of the history and geography teacher in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, west of Paris.
Paty, who has become a free-speech icon, used the cartoons as part of an ethics class to discuss freedom of expression laws in France.
