Neighbour: Suspect’s mum was ‘shocked over arrest’

GEORGE TOWN: Neighbours of the 41-year-old man who was arrested here last month over alleged links to the Islamic State (IS), are clueless about him.

A neighbour, who declined to be named, said she managed to talk to the suspect’s mother, who was shocked as to why her son was arrested when he visited her here recently.

“I don’t know much about him.

I have hardly met him because he does not live here.

“He happened to be back in Penang to visit his elderly mother when the authorities stormed the house and took him into custody,” the neighbour told the New Straits Times.

Another neighbour, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said she last heard the man was staying in a state in the east coast of the peninsula.

“It was high drama when the police came to arrest him.

“Heavily-armed police officers whisked him away into a van,” she said, recalling the incident.

Video clips of the police operation have since gone viral on social media.

Efforts to interview the suspect’s mother, who lives in Sungai Pinang here, were not successful.

The unemployed man, who was found to have been actively promoting IS on 15 Facebook accounts since 2014, was nabbed on April 25.

Inspector-General of Police Tan Sri Khalid Abu Bakar had said the man had planned to launch an attack on a mosque in Penang.

He was among six people scooped up by the authorities, between March and April, following their links to IS, crippling a faction supplying weapons into the country for the terror group and averting the bomb attack on a mosque.

The others are three men and two women, all Malaysians, aged between 24 and 41.