LAST Thursday, I finally came face-to-face with the man I had been trying to track down since early January.
As I inched closer to him in a Singapore General Hospital ward, his wandering eyes suddenly focussed on me.
Propping himself up in bed, his right hand reached for his mobile phone as our eyes met.
But just moments before I could introduce myself to 53-year-old Mr Ong Yew Soon, a nurse intervened. She said he was not allowed any visitors and asked me to leave. Another nurse stepped in and reiterated her instructions. I complied.
But before I left the room, I managed to catch a glimpse of his arched black bushy eyebrows, possibly fearful of the stranger who was staring at him from barely a metre away.
His fears were understandable.
Mr Ong had been shot in the abdomen in a gangland-style shooting, in a restaurant in Denmark on Jan 5.
He was placed in an induced coma at Copenhagen's Rigshospitalet, the Danish capital's national hospital, where he slowly recovered.
While there, he refused interviews with Danish reporters when he regained consciousness so little is known about what actually transpired in the Bali Restaurant in Copenhagen on Jan 5.
Little is known about Mr Ong either.
Danish media carried reports that Mr Ong was touring Denmark and visiting a friend, Mr Roland Tan, 61, when both of them were wounded by a man toting a shotgun in Mr Tan's popular restaurant.
Mr Tan, a former Singapore citizen, was shot in the shoulder and has since been discharged from hospital.
Danish police say the gunman, Vietnamese Nguyen Phi Hung, 47, is still at large.
What struck me most when I finally stood in the same room as Mr Ong was his seemingly good spirits.
For a man whose life hung in the balance just a month ago, he looked very comfortable, even taking a call on his mobile phone as I left the ward.
Ironically, a big sign outside the closely-monitored ward cautioned against the use of mobile phones inside.