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THE police are chasing down every lead they get to nail Mas Selamat Kastari.
Everything from a stolen SingPost delivery van to sightings of limping men are being followed up on until they are sure there is no connection to the escaped Jemaah Islamiah leader.
Police officers were at the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped on Thursday afternoon, asking to view their closed-circuit television camera footage of the main road, Toa Payoh Rise.
SAVH executive director Edmund Wan said: 'They asked if our CCTV camera was working and if we would let them view the footage and we cooperated after they identified themselves.'
The officers spent over two hours there. There were only two officers at first, but four more turned up after the footage had been viewed. After watching the video again, they made a copy and left with it.
Mr Wan claimed he did not know what was in the footage, but The Straits Times understands that it showed a man limping along the road in the direction of Toa Payoh Lorong 1.
The man was wearing a T-shirt and white trousers and was caught on film at around 9.30pm on Wednesday, over five hours after the escape.
The manager of the Esso petrol station nearby also said that the police had gone to the kiosk asking for CCTV footage, but did not say more.
Other tip-offs by the public led to police sending out squads of officers. Yesterday morning, about 40 Gurkhas converged on the Bukit Brown Chinese Cemetery near Lornie Road.
An employee at a nearby petrol station had told the police that he had seen a man limping over a hill towards the cemetery an hour after the prison break-out.
The Gurkhas later moved to the nearby Singapore Island Country Club and then to the Tree Top Walk at MacRitchie Reservoir.
At Bukit Panjang, Singapore Armed Forces soldiers trudged into the forested area which runs to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. They were reinforced later in the day by Gurkhas.
A SingPost van, stolen just four hours before the prison break, appears to have become another possible lead.
On the day Mas Selamat disappeared, taxi companies received an alert at around 7pm asking them to look out for him as well as for the blue delivery van which had been stolen in Woodlands Square around noon.
Mas Selamat, 47, broke out of the Internal Security Department's detention centre off Whitley Road at about 4.05pm.
A SingPost courier had parked the van, with the engine running, by the side of the road just outside the Woodlands Civic Centre. The driver then went to the post office, located on the second floor of the centre, to collect parcels for delivery.
When he returned about five minutes later, the van was gone. Eye-witnesses saw a man in an orange or brown shirt and bermudas walking by the van while talking on his mobile phone.
The man, described as dark-skinned, suddenly made a U-turn, walked back to the van, got in and drove off.
The van had not been fitted with a global positioning system satellite tracking device.
The stolen vehicle has yet to be found, the police said yesterday. However, the authorities would not say if the stolen van was linked to Mas Selamat's escape.
carolynq@sph.com.sg
joolin@sph.com.sg
cheekin@sph.com.sg
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