Singapore—Twenty-seven-year-old Mohamed Noor Hakim Mohamed Jamal, a despatch rider, was sentenced to nine weeks in jail on November 11, Monday, for insulting the modesty of three women.
Mr Hakim had filmed two of the women while they were in the bathrooms of their flats, while he watched the other woman undress, also in her own apartment.
The despatch rider committed these offences once a year from 2017 through this year. His victims were young women ages 18, 22 and 23.
The first time Mr Hakim committed this offence was on August 29, 2017. Yahoo reports that he had been at a playground of a housing estate with his nieces when the lights turned on in a bathroom caught his attention.
Shortly after 10:00 pm, he stood outside the bathroom and then mounted the ledge of the parapet. Finding a woman inside, he took a video of her as she showered so he could see her more clearly.
After that, he returned to the playground.
As he was afraid of getting caught, Mr Hakim deleted the video clip he took of the woman in the bathroom later on.
However, one of the neighbors of the woman had seen that Mr Hakim recorded her while she was in the bathroom and notified the police regarding the incident.
A resident of a nearby unit saw what Hakim did and called the police.
The following year, on November 6, Mr Hakim was seen by a woman who had been taking her clothes off in her bedroom on the ninth floor of an apartment building. The despatch rider had been standing in the corridor outside her bedroom, looking at her while she undressing.
Even though the woman alerted her brother to the Peeping Tom at once, Mr Hakim had already left.
This occurred at around half past 11 o’clock in the evening.
After this incident, the angle of the closed-circuit television (CCTV) outside the woman’s family’s flat was adjusted in order to include the place where Mr Hakim had stood and watched the woman undress.
Four days after the initial Peeping Tom incident, Mr Hakim came back and tried to catch the woman undressing again three more times— at 12:50 am, 5:15 pm and 11:45 pm.
Mr Hakim was arrested after the woman’s family called the police.
However, this did not stop Mr Hakim from further voyeuristic acts, because on August 7 of this year, he filmed another young woman while she was in the shower.
As he was riding his bicycle on his way to his sister’s house that day, he stopped at an apartment building where a woman he knew lived, having broken into her place two years ago.
He avoided the cameras at the building so he would not be seen, and shortly after 9pm, he climbed the parapet outside the bathroom window of the unit where the woman lived.
Mr Hakim then stretched his arm through the open window so that it was inside the shower area of the bathroom, and used his mobile phone to record her taking a shower.
But the woman, who had seen Mr Hakim’s hand through the open window, screamed, causing him to flee the scene.
He also deleted the recording from that night.
Channel NewsAsia (CNA) reports Mr Hakim as admitting that he performed voyeuristic activities to “satisfy his sexual urges”.
According to Deputy Public Prosecutor Benedict Chan, Mr Hakim’s repeated behaviors showed his persistent voyeuristic ways”.
He added, ”The accused has no psychiatric illness or disorder, and his urges were not uncontrollable.”
DPP Chan asked that Mr Hakim be given 11 weeks’ jail time.
For every single charge against him, the despatch rider could have been jailed for as long as one year, be made to pay a fine, or both. -/TISG