Man sentenced to 20 years in jail and 24 strokes of the cane for sexually assaulting 11-year-old girl he met online

The 34-year-old man was sentenced to 20 years in prison and 24 strokes of the cane after he admitted to sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl he met online.

The accused, Muhammad Hisham Abdul Karim, pleaded guilty to a total of four charges of aggravated sexual assault by penetration against the 11-year-old victim, who was legally deemed to be incapable of giving consent in 2017, and another 11 counts were taken into consideration by the judge for sentencing.

The Court heard that the accused searched the Internet in May 2017 and found the Instagram account of the 11-year-old victim at the time. The victim, who was a primary school student, had revealed her school on social media accounts and uploaded photos of herself wearing school clothes.

The accused then made a friend request to the victim and started chatting with her. The victim checked the accused’s account at the time and found that he also followed several friends who were in the same school as her on social media.

Asked the girl to meet at the top of the stairs for sex

Before mid-November 2017, the accused and the victim met at the stairwell of a building. There, the accused not only kissed the girl but also had sex with her.

The accused then asked the girl to meet again and took the girl to an open-air car park near Woodlands on a motorcycle.

The accused let the girl get into a van belonging to his employer, and during the chat, he took methamphetamine and provided utensils for the girl to take drugs. After the girl complied, the accused then sexually assaulted her before sending her home.

After that, the relationship between the two deteriorated, and they did not continue meeting. The victim later revealed to a social worker, in February 2020 that she had had a sexual relationship with the accused.

Judge: Case carefully planned

The judge noted that the victim, in this case, was a young and vulnerable girl and that the accused’s actions were “premeditated and deviously planned”.

The judge said the defendant had extensively searched the internet and targeted the victim after knowing that she was only a primary school student. Giving the girl drugs made her more vulnerable and easier to target, and this was also an aggravating factor. In addition, the accused revealed that he regularly visited prostitutes between 2013 and 2018, which also put victims at serious risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases.

The accused is a paedophile and has a mild to moderate risk of recidivism, according to an expert assessment from the Institute of Mental Health.

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