A detained radicalised person will not get to mix with other prisoners, Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam said yesterday, in response to queries about possible safeguards to ensure that criminals would not be targeted for recruitment in prisons here.

Pointing out that the Home Affairs Ministry (MHA) is “aware of the risks”, he added: “I don’t want to get into details, but you can assume that somebody who is under detention for radicalisation or being a radical or would-be terrorist is not going to have a lot of opportunity to talk to other people.”

Such individuals are detained “in very different places”, he said.

Mr Shanmugam’s comments came after the authorities said on Tuesday that a Singaporean fighter in Syria, Megat Shahdan Abdul Samad, was a former secret society member who had been jailed for a string of drug and other criminal offences. His background had raised questions if criminals were more susceptible to radicalisation.

Shahdan, the 39-year-old who recently appeared in an Islamic State (IS) propaganda video under the name Abu ‘Uqayl, was radicalised after he left Singapore to work in the Middle East in early 2014, said the MHA.

Mr Shanmugam said: “This point that our people get radicalised overseas has been troubling us. It’s something that (the authorities) have been aware of.” Meanwhile, the Mufti of Singapore Mohamed Fatris Bakaram called Shahdan an “individual who has been brainwashed”, and condemned the video’s contents as “full of distortions and falsehood” that were “deliberately designed to mislead Muslim viewers into sympathising” with the IS.

He called on parents, relatives and friends in the Muslim community here to play their “extremely important roles” to help anyone who shows signs of being influenced.

The Islamic Religious Council of Singapore also said yesterday that it is working with religious teachers to combat such narratives online. “Knowledge is the only vaccine to build resilience against such insidious attacks,” it added.