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SINGAPORE – A man detained by authorities since 2016 for actively spreading terrorist ideology online and helping to radicalize at least two Singaporeans was jailed on Thursday (October 22) for six weeks for lying on his passport application.
Zulfikar Mohamad Shariff, an Australian citizen, admitted to making a false statement on an online application form for a Singapore passport on December 11, 2013. The 49-year-old man had stated that he was not a citizen of another country while applying for his passport .
In fact, he had obtained an Australian passport in 2011. Despite knowing that Singapore does not allow dual citizenship, he did not renounce his Singapore citizenship.
Zulfikar, who has six children, applied for Australian citizenship so that her then 15-year-old son could evade his national service obligations.
He continued to enter Singapore using his Singapore passport while withholding information about his Australian citizenship. To enter Singapore, Zulfikar would first enter Malaysia and then travel to Singapore on his Singapore passport.
In this way, he managed to enter Singapore on 15 occasions without his dual citizenship being detected.
Only when Zulfikar arrived in Singapore on July 1, 2016 with his family to celebrate Hari Raya Puasa, was he detained under the Internal Security Act (ISA) for terrorism-related activities. Then his dual citizenship was discovered.
Since then, Zulfikar has renounced his Singapore citizenship and ceased to be a Singapore citizen as of August 26, 2020.
His sentence dates back to October 8, when he was charged and placed in preventive detention.
Zulfikar’s lawyer, Lock Zhi Yong, stated that his client was sorry and had pleaded guilty in the first instance.
Noting that his client has been detained in Singapore for four years, the lawyer said that Zulfikar’s family in Australia have been struggling to cope with his absence, and his son had to seek professional psychological help to deal with the situation.
Lock sought a four to five week jail for his client, citing Zulfikar’s “substantial loss of freedom” thus far.
ISIS with open support
Zulfikar had openly shown his support for the Islamic State terror group and promoted the group and its violent actions in numerous Facebook posts.
He was arrested in Singapore in July 2016 for “actively promoting terrorism and glorifying the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) terror group online,” according to the Interior Ministry, and was detained under the ISA. He was issued an arrest warrant for two years and later it emerged that he helped radicalize at least two Singaporeans.
According to MHA, Zulfikar had exhorted Muslims to reject the constitutional, secular and democratic state in favor of the establishment of an Islamic state governed by the law of Syria. He believed that violence should be used to achieve this goal if necessary, the MHA said.
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