78 per cent of missing persons are found: Police
By Shaffiq Alkhatib and Elizabeth Law
The New Paper
Friday, Nov 09, 2012
SINGAPORE - On average, about 2,600 people went missing every year between 2007 and 2011, said the police. About 78 per cent of them were found, said the police spokesman.
The Crime Library, which helps look for missing people, has seen a total of about 3,000 cases involving missing Singaporeans since 2000.
Responding to queries from The New Paper, its founder, Mr Joseph Tan, said about two dozen of them are still missing.
Said the former policeman: "More than half of these 3,000 missing Singaporeans were teenagers who ran away from home. They usually return home on their own."
Others include senile old folk who had wandered away from home and those with financial problems who had run away from debtors.
Mr Tan added: "People go missing for different reasons. But they are found most of the time."
There have also been cases of Singaporeans who went missing overseas.
One such case involved medical student Kouk Leong Jin, then 28, who went missing in Athens, Greece, when he was there for a conference last year.
He was last heard from on Sept 30 last year when he sent an e-mail to his wife of two weeks.
When The Straits Times approached his family last December, his father said they had stopped looking for him because they did not know how to do it in Greece.
Under Singapore law, a person must be missing for at least seven years before he can be declared dead.
But there are some special circumstances such as accidents or disasters where an application can be fast-tracked, such as the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami and the SilkAir crash in Palembang in December 1997.
