[Photo: Mas Selamat (inset) was captured on April 1 but his wife only learnt of it last Friday. ]

By Zakir Hussain, Political Correspondent

FOURTEEN months ago, she thought she was going to see her husband at the Whitley Road Detention Centre, as she had done almost every week he had been there.

But Mas Selamat Kastari never showed up for their scheduled visit.

That very afternoon, he had used a toilet break before their meeting to escape custody, leaving his wife and children no wiser about his whereabouts, until news of his capture in Malaysia broke on Friday last week.

Sources told The Straits Times that Mas Selamat's wife was concerned for his safety while he was on the run as he did not once contact her.

The 46-year-old is now relieved and thankful that he is still alive and safe, said the source.

She is also anxious for him to be returned to Singapore, so that she can see him again, the source added.

The Straits Times understands that she first heard of his capture over the radio on Friday morning.

The Singapore Jemaah Islamiah (JI) leader was caught on April 1 in a dawn raid in a village in Skudai, Johor, where he had been hiding with the help of two JI members.

His capture became public after The Straits Times broke the story last Friday.

The wife, a homemaker, lives with their five children, aged between eight and 19 years, in a flat in the Choa Chu Kang area. All five children are attending school.

Despite earlier reports, it is understood that the couple do not have relatives in Johor.

Neighbours have described Mas Selamat's wife as a quiet, low-key person, who does not interact with them.

Family friends were however upset that even before Mas Selamat, a former bus mechanic, was identified as a JI leader, he was often out of a job and his family often went hungry.

He also abandoned them when he fled Singapore in December 2001, after a security dragnet netted about a dozen of his JI associates.

However, he later contacted his wife, asking her to take their children to join him in Indonesia. He met his family in Dumai, Sumatra, and obtained a forged identity card and passport for his wife.

The family lived in Riau for close to a year, and Mas Selamat sold soya bean milk while trying to get birth certificates for his children.

He was arrested in 2003 by police while travelling in Tanjung Pinang, and his wife and children were deported back to Singapore.

In recent years, the family has been receiving aid from the Inter-Agency Aftercare Group, which brings several Malay-Muslim organisations together to provide welfare and counselling assistance to the families of JI detainees.

The scheme also hopes this support will nudge the detainees to turn over a new leaf and change their militant views.

Aftercare group chairman Abdul Halim Kader told The Straits Times that when Mas Selamat was first detained here three years ago, the family was in financial difficulty.

But with help from various groups to pay the children's school fees, provide them with some pocket money and pay the family's utility bills, things have improved in the past few years.

'They get the same help as the families of other detainees get,' said Mr Abdul Halim.

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