May 8 (Bloomberg) -- Malaysian police captured Mas Selamat Kastari, the alleged head of al-Qaeda-linked terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, more than a year after he escaped from a high-security detention center in Singapore.

Mas Selamat, blamed for hundreds of deaths in Indonesia and a plot to crash a plane into Singapore’s international airport, was arrested April 1 in an operation by Malaysia’s Special Branch and Singapore’s Internal Security Department, Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs said today in an e-mailed statement.

“He swam across the Straits of Johor with an improvised flotation device” after he escaped from a detention center in February last year, Singapore’s Home Affairs Minister Wong Kan Seng said in a statement. “The Malaysians want to continue to interview him and we’ll let them do the job and when they feel that it’s time to send him back to us, we’ll be happy to receive him back,” said Wong.

The escape sparked the biggest manhunt in Singapore’s history and prompted Interpol to issue a global security alert. Singapore accuses Mas Selamat of leading plots to blow up the U.S. Embassy and other Western targets.

Mas Selamat was the “most-wanted terrorist in Singapore and the most dangerous to have been arrested in the past year,” said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the Singapore-based International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research. His recapture is a “huge victory” for the security services and shows the importance of nations working together to combat terrorism, he said in a telephone interview.

The fugitive had been hiding in Malaysia since his escape, and was planning attacks against targets in Singapore, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak told reporters in Kuala Lumpur today. He was also a threat to domestic security, Najib said.

Toilet Window

Singapore’s government, which spends more than a third of its annual budget on defense and security, apologized to the public for the Feb. 27, 2008, escape of Mas Selamat, who fled through an ungrilled toilet window without his trousers on before a planned family visit.

Authorities plastered Mas Selamat’s photo on notice boards and bus stops throughout the Southeast Asian country of 4.7 million people and his picture was sent to 5.8 million mobile- phone subscribers. The jail-break also exposed Singapore’s Internal Security Department, known as the ISD, to public scrutiny. The ISD is responsible for stopping several alleged terrorist and communist plots against Singapore, according to its Web site.

When Mas Selamat is brought back to Singapore, he will be detained at the same center he escaped from, Wong said in the statement,

“Today’s Whitley Road Detention Centre is very different from the one on 27 of February 2008,” said Wong. “Many security measures have been put in place and that is the place we are going to put him.”

Bali Bombings

Mas Selamat is the alleged leader of the Singapore network of Jemaah Islamiyah. Indonesian and Australian authorities blame the group for the 2002 nightclub bombing in Bali that killed 202 people, including 88 Australians.

It is also blamed for the Marriott Hotel bombing in Jakarta in 2003 that killed 12 people, the bomb explosion outside the Australian Embassy in Jakarta in 2004 that killed at least nine people and a second attack in Bali in 2005 that killed 23 people, including three suicide bombers.

Mas Selamat was detained by Indonesian authorities in February 2003 and deported to Singapore two years ago.

While on the run, he was in contact with JI members in Malaysia and Indonesia, Gunaratna said, citing regional security officials he didn’t identify.

“He was trying to rebuild and restructure the organization,” Gunaratna said. “There are indications that it has been revived and it is important for governments to respond to the threat.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Chen Shiyin in Singapore at schen37@bloomberg.net; Manirajan Ramasamy in Kuala Lumpur at rmanirajan@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 8, 2009 08:49 EDT