A student who was influenced by far-right extremism started role-playing as a extremist in an online game, where he pretended to kill Muslims in a mosque.
The 18-year-old Singaporean, whom the Internal Security Department (ISD) identified as Nick Lee Xing Qiu, had idolised Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019.
Lee wanted to attack Muslims at a mosque in Singapore, and got a tattoo and T-shirts with custom prints of logos associated with neo-Nazi, white supremacist and far-right groups.
Yesterday, ISD said it had issued an order of detention under the Internal Security Act (ISA) against Lee in December 2024.
ISD issued a restriction order to Singaporean housewife Hamizah Hamzah, 56, in January, and arrested Malaysian cleaner Saharuddin Saari, 34, in November 2024.
Hamizah and Saharuddin were self-radicalised supporters of extremist organisations.
ISD said Lee grew hostile towards Muslims in early 2023 after seeing far-right extremist content on social media.
He spent several hours a day consuming extremist content online, and repeatedly watched live-streamed video footage of Tarrant’s attacks.
Soon, Lee started role-playing as Tarrant in a violent online simulation game.
Without naming the game, ISD said Lee downloaded video game modifications so that he could pretend to be Tarrant killing people.
By early 2024, Lee believed it would be justified to kill other ethnicities.
Calling himself an “East Asian supremacist”, Lee believed in the superiority of Chinese, Korean and Japanese ethnicities, and supported white supremacy.
He was deeply convinced by the Great Replacement Theory, which claims white people in Western countries are in danger of being replaced by non-white immigrants.
Said ISD: “(Lee) believed that violent action had to be taken to prevent the Chinese majority in Singapore from being supplanted by what he perceived to be a rapidly growing Malay population.”
ISD said Lee wanted to carry out attacks against Muslims in Singapore with other far-right individuals he had met online.
Said ISD: “While he claimed to lack the courage to conduct an attack alone, he admitted that he would have participated in attacks together with his online contacts.” — The Straits Times/ANN
