SINGAPORE, July 17 — A paedophile, who had previously spent a year behind bars for molesting his daughter when she was four, was sentenced to 24 years’ jail and the maximum 24 strokes of the cane today for sexually abusing two other children.
This time, his victims were his lover’s eight-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son. Both have a low IQ and the boy is intellectually disabled.
The man took them to a hotel for regular “sleepovers” where he made them perform sexual acts on each other while he recorded them and watched the videos later.
The abuse lasted two years after which the children no longer saw the man.
Four years later though, he met the girl by chance when she was 14 years old.
She agreed to have sex with him in exchange for cigarettes and money.
The man, now aged 47, pleaded guilty in the High Court today to three counts of aggravated sexual assault by penetration. Thirteen other similar charges were considered for sentencing.
He cannot be named due a court gag order to protect the victims’ identities.
Threatened to physically punish them
The court heard that he sexually assaulted the two victims from 2012 to 2014 at the Seng Wah Hotel in Geylang.
He had been having an affair with their mother. She worked as a cleaner then and he was her supervisor.
He regularly had dinner with the family, including the children’s father, at a coffee shop near their home.
After a few months, he asked for permission to take the children out by himself.
Apart from taking them out for meals and games at the arcade, he got his lover’s permission for them to stay overnight with him at the hotel under the pretext of spending time with them.
During these “sleepovers”, he made them watch pornographic videos and got them to re-enact the scenes while he filmed them.
He threatened to physically punish them if they did not do as told and made them repeat the acts until he was satisfied, Deputy Public Prosecutor (DPP) Eunice Lau told the court.
He recorded the acts on his mobile phone and watched them afterwards.
Hotel records showed that between May 2012 and July 2014, he checked into the hotel with the children 24 times for one or two nights at a time.
Further abused girl in exchange for cigarettes, money
The sexual abuse only stopped when the girl drummed up the courage to tell her mother that she did not want to meet the man anymore, saying he had beat them.
She did not reveal the sexual abuse out of shame and fear that her parents would not believe her.
It is not known if their mother or the man ended the affair but they then fell out of contact.
In 2018, when the girl was 14 years old, she met him again by chance and he gave her his contact details.
The girl later contacted him to ask for cigarettes.
When he told her to meet him alone in his flat, he led her to his bedroom and made sexual advances on her.
“She continued to meet him on multiple occasions to engage in consensual sexual activity with him in exchange for the cigarettes and money extended,” DPP Lau said.
The man also filmed the acts on his mobile phone with her consent.
His offences came to light last year after the girl’s brother was arrested for several offences including theft and having sex with a minor.
After the boy, who was then 16, was charged, he underwent a mandatory psychological assessment at the Institute of Mental Health (IMH) which revealed that he had been sexually abused.
The psychologist then alerted the police.
An IMH forensic psychiatrist diagnosed the man as a paedophile with a high risk of sexual offending given his history of repeated sexual acts with children.
He had re-offended less than two years after being released from jail for sexually abusing his own daughter.
The two victims told IMH psychiatrists that they felt “disgusted and bad”, with the boy, who has an IQ of 59, reporting that he felt “tortured” by the sexual abuse.
For each sexual assault charge, he could have been jailed up to 20 years and given at least 12 strokes of the cane. — TODAY
