Who goes MISSING in Singapore?

In 2024, the police logged about four missing person reports every day. Who are these people - and how do they vanish in a city where almost everyone seems accounted for?

- Jessica Novia and Fatimah Mujibah

On Aug 29 at 11.05am, an 11-year-old boy with special needs stepped out of his Marine Crescent home, barefoot, shirtless and alone.

A neighbour's CCTV camera caught a brief glimpse of Muhammad Hairil Effendi, who was mostly non-verbal, before he disappeared from the frame.

By evening, news of his disappearance had rippled across social media. Facebook groups lit up with appeals for information. Residents, joined by volunteers, fanned out across the neighbourhood, including East Coast Park and its lagoon, to help look for the boy.

At 10.52pm, the police issued an official appeal for information on his whereabouts.

The next evening, the waters off East Coast Park yielded a heartbreaking answer. A body recovered by police and Singapore Civil Defence Force officers was identified as Hairil.

In Gallup's 2025 Global Safety Report, Singapore ranked as one of the safest places in the world.

The country scored 95 out of 100 on the Law and Order Index - one of the highest scores worldwide and 98 per cent of residents surveyed said they feel safe walking alone at night.

But this sense of security creates a familiar "safety paradox". In a city where danger feels distant, pockets of real vulnerability can be easy to miss.

One stark example is missing person cases.

In a tightly connected city-state with one of the world's lowest crime rates and an extensive surveillance network, the idea of people simply disappearing seems almost unthinkable.

Yet, every year, thousands of people vanish in Singapore sometimes for hours, sometimes for days, and sometimes for good.

In a 2022 parliamentary reply, Home Affairs Minister K. Shanmugam disclosed that 5,072 people were reported missing to the police between 2019 and 2021.

More recently, the police received 1,355 missing person reports in 2024 up from 1,095 in 2023 and 1,211 in 2022 - an average of about four a day.