SINGAPORE – He wanted to kill Singapore Armed Forces (SAF) personnel stationed outside Sembawang Air Base, LGBTQ students at the tertiary institution he attended and Muslim acquaintances who disagreed with his radical beliefs.
Those were among the violent plans harboured by 19-year-old Tan Jun Jie, the Internal Security Department (ISD) said in a statement on July 27.
Tan was one of three male teenagers detained under the Internal Security Act between April and June. The other two, aged 14 and 15, were not named because of their ages.
Although unrelated to one another, they had been self-radicalised online and planned to carry out attacks in Singapore.
Tan, who converted to Islam in early 2022 after learning about the religion on social media, was exposed to radical foreign preachers later that year.
By January 2025, he was consuming pro-ISIS material online and eventually concluded that “armed violence was permissible against kuffar (disbelievers)”, ISD said.
Besides non-Muslims, Tan also considered Shi’ite Muslims, Muslims whose religious views differ from his own, and those who serve secular governments, to be part of this group.
Before he devised physical plans for violence, Tan attempted cyber attacks in mid-2025, targeting the websites of several local and foreign Muslim organisations that he deemed to be deviant.
These included the Muhammadiyah Association (Singapore), Jaafari Muslim Association Singapore and a foreign organisation associated with the Ahmadiyya sect.
Using malware that he downloaded, he carried out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on these websites, with the aim of flooding their servers with internet traffic to prevent users from accessing them.
ISD said Tan wanted to do so to “protect Muslims from what he believed to be misguided teachings”.
Although he recorded himself justifying his actions, he did not disseminate the oral declaration as he was unsure if his attacks succeeded, given that the websites remained accessible.
The police are separately investigating Tan for potential offences under the Computer Misuse Act.
At the end of 2025, he devised plans to target both SAF personnel and LGBTQ students at the tertiary institution he attended, and was prepared to be killed in the process of carrying them out.
He regarded the SAF service members as “enemy combatants serving the ‘kuffar Government’ of Singapore”, and prioritised them as targets, believing that killing them would earn him greater divine rewards and increase his chances of dying a martyr.
He also targeted his LGBTQ peers because he viewed their behaviour as not conforming to the teachings of Islam.
To prepare for the attacks, he researched knife skills online and planned to buy a knife with a 10cm blade from a hardware store in a shopping mall.
ISD noted that Tan had no specific timeline for his domestic attacks. Instead, he intended to use them as a back-up plan if he was unable to travel overseas to participate in armed jihad – a path he believed would guarantee his martyrdom if he died in battle.
He initially planned to enter Gaza, mulling over the possibility of using humanitarian work as a guise to join Hamas and fight the Israel Defence Forces (IDF).
However, he scrapped those plans by January 2026 as it was not feasible to travel there, and set his sights on Somalia, where he believed the local ISIS affiliate was the only one actively fighting “disbelievers”.
He actively searched for flights from Singapore to the East African nation, as well as researched bomb-making techniques in preparation.
During that period, Tan had already viewed himself as an ISIS member, having taken the bai’ah, or pledge of allegiance.
In early 2026, his violent thoughts would also extend to his Muslim acquaintances who disagreed with his ideologies.
“He had imagined, while preparing food at home, that his kitchen cleaver was a knife to slit his acquaintances’ throats, mimicking executions in ISIS’ propaganda videos,” said ISD.
His acquaintances reported him to the authorities. Tan was arrested in April and received a detention order in May.
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