By letting the water run and hanging a pair of pants over a ledge above the door of the urinal, it said, the prisoner gave himself 11 minutes to change clothes, shimmy down a drainpipe onto a cushion of rolls of toilet paper, climb a fence and disappear.

The report by a government commission said that the escape on Feb. 27 had been the result of "a confluence of factors," that no single person had been responsible and that there was no evidence that the prisoner had been given inside help.

The prisoner, Mas Selamat bin Kastari, 47, is accused by the government of being the local leader of the Islamic terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah. The government accuses him of a failed plot to bomb the US Embassy and several other targets in Singapore. Officials also say he planned to crash an airplane into Singapore's airport.

His escape has been a major embarrassment for the government, which has not been able to capture Mas Selamat, its most-wanted man, despite a nationwide manhunt. Thousands of wanted posters hung around Singapore are a daily reminder of the failure.

As soon as the report was posted on the Internet, a bulletin board on the Web site of the Straits Times newspaper was flooded with angry, astonished and mocking reactions from anonymous writers.

"We look really stupid to the world," read a comment by someone signing himself opahleo. "I am embarrassed."

In delivering the report to Parliament Monday afternoon, Wong Kan Seng, the deputy prime minister, acknowledged public anger about the escape. For some people, he said, "the whole episode made good creative material for cynical humor."

The report described what appeared to have been a carefully planned but remarkably simple escape that took advantage of small errors in a fairly relaxed prison routine as the prisoner was being escorted to a weekly visit from his family. It seemed to substantiate the one-word analysis of the escape given last month by a former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew: complacency.

Despite the straightforwardness of the escape it described, the commission said it would not release the entire report for fear of "harming national interest and endangering the men and women who serve the nation." The fact that a ventilation window in the bathroom cubicle had not been secured with a grill was "the single most crucial factor" in the escape, Wong told Parliament.

He said the officers who were at fault would be disciplined, penalized and replaced. Answering questions from Parliament, Wong said he believed that Mas Selamat had not left Singapore but was in hiding and still dangerous.

"We consider him to be a key trigger in the terrorist network," he said. "If he could leave Singapore and connect back with his friends they could well launch a revenge attack." A tightly controlled city of 4.5 million people, Singapore is a 45-minute boat ride from Indonesia, where Mas Selamat is believed to have contacts within the Jemaah Islamiyah network.

In addition to the unsecured window, Wong listed several other errors that he said had contributed to the escape. The guard escorting Mas Selamat allowed him to close the door to the urinal cubicle from which he escaped, and there was an undetected security weak point where inner and outer fences converged with an enclosed staircase and walkway.

Also, he said, security cameras monitoring the inner and outer fences were not being actively monitored, and prison officers failed to notice that the inmate apparently was wearing two sets of clothes and were slow and indecisive when they realized he was taking too long in the cubicle.

The commission said it had tested its analysis by arranging a re-enactment of the escape. It said a prison guard had taken just 49 seconds to "climb out of the ventilation window in the urinal cubicle, scale the fence, climb onto the roof of the enclosed staircase and walkway, and jump over the converged perimeter fences." Another prison officer tested the next leg of the hypothetical escape route, taking 2 minutes and 44 seconds to run from the converged fences to the nearest highway.

By the time the guards broke into the closed cubicle 11 minutes after Mas Selamat turned on the tap, he could have been long gone, the inquiry concluded.

The escape took place at what seems to have been a vulnerable time in the prison routine - Mas Selamat's weekly visit with his wife and children.

"Family visits to sustain detainees' bonds with their wife and children and other family members are an important part of the re-education program for detainees," Wong said.

Prisoners are escorted from their high-security cellblocks to a less rigorous setting. As a convenience, the report said, prisoners were sometimes allowed to use a nearby toilet meant for prison staff to shave and comb their hair. It said that Mas Selamat had apparently been planning his escape for some time, testing the reaction of his guards by partially closing the urinal door several times, then fully closing it.

Prisoners are allowed to change into civilian clothes to meet their relatives, and on the day of his escape, Mas Selamat asked his guard for privacy as he changed. But instead of changing, he kept his prison outfit on under his civilian clothes - a yellow robe and green trousers.

As Mas Selamat squeezed through the window and escaped, his guard could still see a pair of green trousers hanging over a concrete lintel above the urinal door. The yellow robe was found later outside the prison fence.

                                                     Home