A 49-year-old Singaporean bus driver who lied about spotting an escaped terror suspect has been sentenced to 21 months in jail for giving false information to police, court officials said Tuesday.A district judge said she had given Ng Hang Hai a stiff sentence to deter others from misleading police hunting for Mas Selamat Kastari, the alleged leader of the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) militant group in Singapore.
Despite a massive police manhunt, the 47-year-old Kastari remains at large nearly a month after his escape from a detention centre.
Ng had told police he saw a man resembling Kastari boarding his bus about four hours after the suspect escaped from detention on February 27, court documents showed.
He claimed the man was wearing blue jeans and slippers, bleeding from his left leg, walking with a limp and spoke Malay with an Indonesian accent. He told police the man had scratch marks on his forearms.
Ng pleaded guilty to two charges of giving false information to the police, saying he had lied in the hopes of receiving a monetary reward.
District Judge Hoo Sheau Peng said it was "fitting to send a clear message that reprehensible and malicious conduct such as that of the accused will not be tolerated."
Hoo said however the sentence should not deter others with useful information about Kastari to report to the police.
Kastari was accused of plotting to hijack a plane and crash it into Singapore's Changi Airport in 2001 but was never charged. He was being held under an internal security law which allows for detention without trial.