Singapore - Singaporeans had to wait for this breaking news for more than a year: Mas Selamat, a suspected Islamic terrorist leader who escaped from a top-security Singapore detention centre in February last year, has been arrested in neighbouring Malaysia.

The 48-year-old, whose escape caused huge embarrassment to Singapore's authorities, was captured on April 1 while hiding in the state of Johor, not far from the border with Singapore, the Straits Times newspaper reported, citing regional intelligence sources.

Singapore's government confirmed that Mas Selamat had been captured, adding that he had escaped from Singapore via "an improvised flotation device" and went to Johor Baru.

He is now believed to be detained in Johor.

As the news spread in Singapore, people were relieved.

"Now I can sleep peacefully," one Singaporean said in an internet forum. "One of the best news to happen since the beginning of 2009," said another.

However, there were also some more sarcastic comments from the public.

"May be better to leave him in Johor. If extradited again back here, he may escape again," read one comment.

Born in Indonesia, Mas Selamat is suspected to be the leader of Singapore's wing of the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiah militant group.

Jemaah Islamiah is blamed for the deadly bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali in 2002, which killed 200 people.

With the arrest of Mas Selamat the biggest manhunt in the history of Singapore has come to an end.

He was first arrested in 2003 in Indonesia and served an 18-month-prison term before he went missing.

Three years later he was captured a second time while using a fake identity card and extradited to Singapore.

The authorities detained Mas Selamat under the city-state's Internal Security Act, which permits indefinite imprisonment without trial, accusing him of having planned to hijack a plane and crash it into Singapore's Changi airport.

He was held in the top-security detention centre on Whitley Road. But on February 28, 2008, Mas Selamat managed to escape by duping his guards during a toilet break.

Two guards and an internal security department officer allowed him to close the urinal door blocking their view on him.

Mas Selamat squeezed through the toilet window that lacked a grill and emerged from the detention centre through a weakness in the perimeter fence.

Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng described the mistakes at the time being as "so simple as to appear silly and incredible."

Singapore's humiliated government started a huge manhunt.

Security personnel were put on round-the-clock duty securing all borders and all routes out of Singapore, scouring nature reserves and forests and knocking on doors of homes.

Hundreds of thousands of "wanted" posters were distributed and plastered around the city state in supermarkets, post offices, subway stations, busses and other public places.

Singapore's authorities came under pressure and faced massive public criticism, as they proved unable to hold their most-wanted terrorist safe and to track down the fugitive in the tiny city state.

"I noticed that many Singaporeans have simply forgotten about Mas Selamat, and our community engagement of the public with regard to terrorism seems to have slackened," a Singaporean legislator said in Parliament in February on the first anniversary of Mas Selamat's escape.

But Deputy Prime Minister Wong assured parliament and the public that the government had not slackened in its search for him.

"Whether Mas Selamat is in Singapore or he has fled our country, we will hunt him down as we did before," the minister promised.

Now he has lived up to this promise, thanks to a joint operation by Malaysian and Singaporean security agencies.

The capture of Mas Selamat brings at least some closure to an embarrassing episode for the Singapore government.

"But this is not to say that there are no more questions to be asked," said Straits Times associate editor Zuraidah Ibrahim.

"Once further details of his capture are released, a lot more will be asked about how it all happened," she added.