Warning: Graphic and disturbing content.
SINGAPORE – For almost two years, two young siblings endured abuse and neglect from their father, including being confined naked in the toilet for almost 10 months.
The man, who had trained in silat, taekwondo and aikido, would repeatedly punch, slap, kick and cane the children, treating them as “punching bags” for his frustration.
On Tuesday (April 30), he was sentenced to 34-and-a-half years in prison and 12 strokes of the cane for killing his five-year-old daughter, and abusing her and her younger brother.
The girl died of a head injury in August 2017, after her father smacked her face up to 20 times in the toilet where the two children were kept all day. She weighed just 13.2kg at the time of her death.
The 44-year-old man cannot be named due to gag orders protecting the identity of the victim’s surviving brother.
The victim’s name was previously protected, but on Tuesday, the judge allowed her to be identified by her first name, Ayeesha, “so that society may remember her”.
Calling the lengthy sentence unprecedented, Justice Aedit Abdullah said the man had subjected his children to “inhumane, disgusting abuse”, and that his punishment had to reflect the “abhorrence and disgust of the community”.
“The primary consideration is retribution: It is punishment to reflect the state’s denouncing of such loathsome and sickening acts. Others must also be severely deterred from committing any abuse of this kind.”
The man was originally on trial for the capital charge of murder in Ayeesha’s death. He decided to admit to the offences after a reduced charge of culpable homicide was put on the table by the prosecution.
He wept as details of the abuse were read out loud, and when videos of him hitting Ayeesha and her brother at home were shown to those in court on Tuesday.
He pleaded guilty to six charges comprising one charge of culpable homicide, four charges of child abuse and one charge of disposing evidence. Another 20 charges covering child abuse and lying to police officers were considered in sentencing.
The prosecution said it would review the case against Ayeesha’s stepmother, who was named as a co-accused in the charges of confining the children to the toilet. The woman previously testified as a prosecution witness.
CHILDREN ATE THEIR OWN FAECES OUT OF HUNGER
Ayeesha and her brother were the offender’s biological children from his first marriage. They entered foster care in June 2014, but returned to live with the offender and his second wife in early 2015.
The man worked as an auxiliary police officer or security officer for different companies from 2003 to 2016. From 2016 to April 2017, he worked in a fast food restaurant. He was unemployed after that.
He started facing financial difficulties in 2015 and would buy less food and diapers. He and his wife also reduced the children’s meals to twice a day.
Ayeesha and her brother started playing with and eating their own faeces because they were hungry, and they lost weight.
Towards the end of 2015, the man and his wife started physically abusing the children by hitting them. Ayeesha was then three, while her brother was two.
In one incident in December 2015, the man repeatedly punched and smacked Ayeesha and her brother after noticing rice, flour, curry powder, utensils and faeces strewn across the kitchen.
In another incident in February 2016, he saw Ayeesha and her brother eating the contents of a mattress. Their diapers were also torn.
He forcefully slapped them, causing their heads to hit each other.
CONFINED IN SMALL SPACES
That same month, the man and his wife decided to confine the children in a “naughty corner”, after he complained that they often woke up earlier than the adults and made a mess in the house.
The couple barricaded Ayeesha and her brother between a bookshelf and a wardrobe in a corner of their bedroom, in a space measuring about 90cm by 90cm.
From February to October 2016, they kept the children there all day even when they had not misbehaved, only allowing them out to eat and bathe.
The abuse continued, and was captured by a closed-circuit television (CCTV) camera that the couple installed in the “naughty corner”.
On one occasion on March 27, 2016, the man repeatedly slapped, punched, caned and kicked Ayeesha after seeing that she had smeared her faeces on the wall.
In CCTV footage shown in court, the man was seen delivering a total of 86 blows to the young girl with her brother next to her. Both children were clad only in diapers.
The assault lasted 16 minutes. At one point, he slapped and pounded Ayeesha’s face so hard that she lay motionless for the next minute-and-a-half.
On another occasion on Aug 27, 2016, the man repeatedly caned Ayeesha and her brother while they were seated in a double-seater pram in the living room.
In CCTV footage of the assault, which lasted 24 minutes, the man scolded Ayeesha and her brother and caned their legs and heads.
In October 2016, the couple decided to shift the “naughty corner” to the toilet in the kitchen. They only allowed the children out to be fed or when the man and his wife wanted to use the toilet.
The children were kept naked in the toilet, which was often stained with their faeces.
FATHER WANTED TO PUT KIDS UP FOR ADOPTION
The children had not attended any school since May 2015, and records of the family’s encounters with social services showed that they were not seen by any case officers from around that time.
After the two children returned to their father’s care in 2015, Thye Hua Kwan – Tanjong Pagar Family Service Centre (FSC), which worked with the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF), continued monitoring their welfare.
At a counselling session on May 25, 2015, the man told the case officer from the FSC that Ayeesha and her brother would be living with his mother-in-law soon.
This was the last time that a case officer would see the children until Ayeesha’s death. The man did not take the children to all subsequent visits to the FSC, and would often lie that they were with his relatives.
At another session in September 2015, the man said that both children were registered at another childcare centre and staying with his mother-in-law.
From October 2015 to September 2016, the case officer was unable to contact the man despite calling and sending messages and emails, and visiting the family’s flat. These all went unanswered.
After the abuse had started, on Sept 1, 2016, the man and his wife went to Thye Hua Kwan FSC and lied to the case officer that the two children were under the care of his brother.
The next month, the man called the case officer and asked that Ayeesha and her brother be placed in foster care as he feared he might harm them out of frustration.
The case officer notified MSF, asked the man to take his children down to the FSC the next day, and also advised him to tap on his neighbours or parents to care for the children that night.
But the next day, the man went to Thye Hua Kwan FSC alone. He lied that Ayeesha and her brother were with his mother, but that she was not able to care for them in the long term.
When the case officer suggested arranging foster care, the man said he wanted to give them up for adoption. He was given the contact details of Apkim Centre of Social Services, an adoption service.
He visited Apkim with his wife sometime later, but did not take the children along and lied that they were being cared for by his mother.
An Apkim officer informed him that the adoption process could not proceed unless the children’s biological mother also gave consent, or unless MSF could facilitate doing away with that requirement.
On Nov 10, 2016, another officer from Thye Hua Kwan FSC who had taken over from the previous case officer called the man. He again lied that the children were staying with his mother and also informed the officer of his adoption enquiry.
On Feb 14, 2017, the couple visited Thye Hua Kwan FSC to request financial support.
On April 27, 2017, the FSC case officer visited the couple’s flat. The man’s wife requested that they step out of the flat to talk, claiming that her husband needed to come out to the living room to change after showering. The court previously heard they lived in a one-room rented flat.
The case officer and the man’s wife went to the void deck, where the woman informed the case officer that Apkim was still processing the adoption.
Less than two months before Ayeesha’s death, on June 21, 2017, the man’s wife informed the FSC case officer that her husband was following up with Apkim on the adoption, and requested that Thye Hua Kwan FSC close their case.
AYEESHA’S DEATH
Around 9pm on Aug 10, 2017, Ayeesha and her brother were sleeping in the toilet when their stepmother asked them to move their legs, as they had not been active the entire day while staying inside.
Ayeesha’s brother did as told, but Ayeesha did not, and her stepmother complained to the offender.
The man went to the toilet, pulled Ayeesha up from the ground and smacked her face 15 to 20 times. When he placed her on the ground, her head was tilted back in an awkward position.
The man then went to bed. At about 3am, his wife complained that the siblings were sleeping in a weird posture, so he went to the toilet, where he assaulted the children.
The two siblings remained in the toilet while the family went about their day on Aug 11, 2017.
That evening, the children’s stepmother went to use the toilet and found Ayeesha, who was facing up with her eyes closed, to be cold and unresponsive.
The woman called Ayeesha’s father over. He administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but realised that his daughter had died.
ATTEMPTS TO HIDE HIS TRACKS
The man told his wife he was going to “clean up the evidence”.
In the early hours of Aug 12, 2017, he took the CCTV camera facing the toilet, a mobile phone, a pair of scissors, a cane, a rubber hose, bath towels and a child safety gate from home, and threw them away in different rubbish bins nearby. These were never retrieved.
He also devised a plan to protect his wife from legal consequences by telling her to pretend that the two children had been with him at his mother’s house, while she was at home.
He acted on this plan by assaulting her, so that she could make a police report against him to shield herself. The woman lodged a report later that day.
The man then took Ayeesha’s body and his son to Singapore General Hospital in a pram. Emergency doctors tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate Ayeesha, and eventually pronounced her death at 10.49am.
The doctor who attended to Ayeesha noticed that her body had a foul odour and recorded extensive injuries on the girl. The hospital informed the police about the case.
When questioned by police at the hospital, the man lied that he was having breakfast with Ayeesha and her brother when he noticed she was weak and brought her to the hospital.
He was arrested that afternoon, and brought in for further questioning.
He continued lying in four more statements to police, claiming that Ayeesha had hit her head and tumbled down a slide at a playground the night before, and that he and the children had spent the night away from the flat.
He only admitted that he was lying on Aug 18, 2017, when shown police camera footage of himself returning to his block alone in the early hours of Aug 12, 2017.
SURVIVING SON
Ayeesha’s brother, who was almost four when she died, was also seen by doctors at SGH and referred to KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital.
He was warded there for four months until November 2017, before being released into foster care.
Apart from severe malnutrition, he was found to be suffering from global developmental delay with social deprivation as a factor. He did not speak and was socially withdrawn and unable to stand independently.
In a video taken around end-August 2016 by the man’s wife, Ayeesha and her brother appeared expressionless and listless as they were taken back home in a pram, only moving when told to by their stepmother.
“What we watched in a few minutes today was their life every day for two years,” said Deputy Public Prosecutor Norine Tan, after this and other videos of the abuse were screened in court.
The abuse inflicted by the man on his children “squarely falls within the worst of its type” and would “break the will of any human being”, let alone very young children, Ms Tan told the court.
The prosecution sought a total of 30 to 34 years’ imprisonment and at least 12 strokes of the cane.
The defence, comprising lawyers Mervyn Cheong, Krishna R Sharma, Melvin Loh and Lim Yi Zheng, asked for a shorter sentence, arguing that previous cases set precedents of 18 to 20 years in jail.
A sentence of 30 to 34 years would be unprecedented, Mr Cheong said, but Ms Tan countered that this was because the facts of the case were themselves unprecedented.
In his decision, Justice Aedit noted that the offender had subjected his children not only to physical abuse, but also mental and emotional trauma.
He said the man had taken the concept of a “naughty corner” – used by some parents as a method of temporary time-out to discipline a child – and “mutated it into a device of torture”.
“You went far beyond any measure of discipline and essentially used these children as punching bags for whatever frustration or anger you felt,” said the judge.
“Your remorse cannot reverse the death of Ayeesha, or the suffering she and your son went through. You must make your own peace with what you had done.”
The man’s mother, brother and niece also attended the hearing, and spoke to him after his sentencing.
For culpable homicide not amounting to murder, he could have been jailed for life, or jailed for up to 20 years with a fine and caning.
The maximum punishment for ill-treating a child is four years’ imprisonment, a fine of S$4,000, or both.
For disposing of evidence in a culpable homicide, the man could have been jailed for up to seven years and fined.
CNA has contacted MSF, Thye Hua Kwan – Tanjong Pagar FSC and Apkim for more information. CNA
