Man who sexually abused 11 girls, including daughter, granddaughters and nieces, jailed for 21 years

SINGAPORE - A 71-year-old man who, over three decades, sexually abused 11 girls, including his daughter, his son’s two daughters, and his four nieces, was sentenced to 21 years’ jail on Sept 17.

The other four victims were students from an enrichment centre he and his wife ran from 1997 to 2021.

The 11 victims were assaulted between 1990 and 2023. Some were as young as five or six years old when he started preying on them.

During this period, he was sent to prison twice, in August 1999 and March 2020, for molestation and sexual exploitation offences committed against other victims.

But the offences involving the 11 victims came to light only in August 2023 after his granddaughters told their mother he had sexually assaulted them.

The man, who uses a wheelchair, now has a rare blood cancer known as myelofibrosis.

He cannot be caned as he is above 50 years old, and cannot be named due to a gag order to prevent the victims from being identified.

In sentencing the man, High Court judge Mavis Chionh rejected the prosecution’s submission for a jail term of 32 to 36 years.

She said: “While I have no doubt that the present case is a most egregious one and the accused’s conduct is most reprehensible, (the sentence sought) is disproportionate with his overall criminality in comparison with like cases.”

The judge said she would have imposed a jail sentence of 26 years.

But she added that a downward adjustment was warranted to account for his reduced life expectancy due to his terminal illness so that the sentence did not amount to a life sentence.

On July 24, he had pleaded guilty to 10 charges in relation to six of the victims.

These included a charge for raping his daughter in 2005 when she was 15 years old, and a charge for sexual assault by penetration committed against his older granddaughter in 2023 when she was seven years old.

The other charges are for molestation, committing an obscene act involving a child, showing pornography to a child, and unnatural sex.

The remaining 23 charges were considered during sentencing.

The man began sexually assaulting his daughter in 1997 when she was six to seven years old.

He kept telling her not to tell anyone what he did to her because the family would split up, and it would be her fault.

He raped her in 2005, after which he stopped sexually abusing her.

In 2023, two years after he was released from prison, he preyed on the two daughters of one of his sons.

He showed the older sister a pornographic video before he sexually violated her.

The man, who was then 68 years old, told the then seven-year-old after the assault that she would not be his favourite grandchild if she told anyone what had happened.

That year, he also molested the younger sister, who was then five years old, while they were watching TV.

On Aug 4, 2023, the younger girl told her mother the man had touched her.

When the woman asked if this had happened to other children, the older girl disclosed what the man had done to her.

The sisters’ mother then lodged a police report.

One of the nieces was sexually abused between 1994 and 1996 when she was aged between nine and 12 years old.

She went to the man’s home for tuition, and would stay over on Fridays to play with her cousins.

Once, when she cried, he gave her $50 and told her not to tell anyone what had happened.

She later came up with excuses not to go for tuition.

In 2012, one of her aunts confronted the man over what he had done to her daughter, who was another niece he had sexually abused.