An 18-year-old Singaporean student who identified as an “East Asian supremacist” and was radicalised by violent far-right extremist ideologies has been detained under Singapore’s Internal Security Act.
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Nick Lee Xing Qiu, who is of Chinese ethnicity, had aspired to conduct attacks against Malays and Muslims in Singapore. He believed that the Chinese, Korean and Japanese ethnicities were superior, the Internal Security Department said on Monday.
Lee was issued with a detention order in December last year. He is the third Singaporean youth with far-right extremist ideologies to be dealt with under the city state’s Internal Security Act.
The first case involved a 16-year-old detained in December 2020 for planning machete attacks on mosques. The second case also involved a 16-year-old who was issued with a restriction order in November 2023 after authorities found that he identified as a white supremacist and aspired to conduct attacks overseas.
Lee first started developing hostility towards Muslims in early 2023 after encountering Islamophobic and far-right content on social media. He spent several hours a day searching for and consuming extremist online content, according to the Internal Security Department.
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