• The 17-year-old boy was detained in March, ISD said.
• It is said that the suspect is considered “East Asian supremacist”.
• The minister said: “This boy wants to kill at least 100 Muslims.”

A Singaporean teenager plans to detain dozens of Muslims outside several mosques, the city’s internal security department said on Wednesday.

The 17-year-old boy was detained in March, ISD said in a statement, adding that he believed white supremacist Brenton Tarrant (who killed believers in 2019 at a New Zealand mosque – a “hero”.

ISD also said he was “known as “East Asian supremacist” and decided to conduct Friday’s prayer attacks at five mosques throughout Singapore.

Interior Minister K Shanmugam told reporters: “The boy wants to kill at least 100 Muslims so he can kill more Muslims than Tarrant killed.

“When he was arrested…he had made many attempts to pick up the gun. He told ISD very publicly that if he had the gun, he would have attacked.”

The teenager approached 18-year-old Nick Lee, who was detained in December for creating a similar plan.

There have been several cases in this multicultural country in recent years, with Singaporeans allegedly detained for developing attack plans after being exposed to extremist content online.

In 2024, authorities arrested a teenage boy with alleged plans to attack Daesh group-inspired attacks in a busy suburb.

In the same statement Wednesday, ISD also said a 15-year-old girl was under a restraining order in February that prohibited her from traveling without the approval of the ISD director and not accessing the Internet.

It claims that between July 2023 and December 2024, the girl is in at least eight short-term romantic online relationships with overseas-based Daesh Group supporters.

“She went to promise allegiance to Daesh chatbot,” Shanmugam said. “She wanted to fight for Daesh, she looked up at the flight to Syria and she thought about how she would save money to plan her trip.”

He added that the trend of radicalism and extremism rising through the Internet is “related”.

ISD says “self-radicalization can happen very quickly.”

“It only took a few weeks for a 15-year-old,” it said.