LIKE shadows moving around undetected among the population, the 12 militant suspects arrested over the weekend were “clean skins”, potential attackers with a clean record who flew under the radar of security officials.

“The 12 men who were arrested are from a new cell. There is no (criminal) record on any of them and they flew under our radar,” a senior counter-terrorism source told The Straits Times.

“And if there is no (intelligence) on such militants, how are we going to disrupt them? We need to broaden our intelligence collection,” said the source.

… “A lot of them have no past records. No one is aware of their existence and the threats they pose until something happens,” said Associate Professor Kumar Ramakrishna, head of Policy Studies at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.