Man Sentenced to 20 Years’ Jail for Sexually Assaulting 11YO Girl He Knew from Instagram

A man, Muhammad Hisham Abdul Karim, 34, had “trawled the Internet” before finding an 11-year-old primary school student he fancied back in 2017.

He proceeded to befriend her on Instagram and took their relationship offline, where he committed sexual acts.

For his actions of sexual assault by penetration of a minor, he was sentenced to 20 years in jail and 24 strokes of the cane on 5 September 2022.

Here’s what happened.

He Sexually Assaulted the Victim and Gave Her Drugs

During the court hearing, it was revealed that Hisham had seen the profile of the victim, then 11, on Instagram sometime back in May 2017. He could identify that she was a primary school student and knew of which school she came from, as she had uploaded pictures of herself in her school jersey onto her profile.

Hisham then sent her a friend request and the two started chatting via the app. The victim had also noticed that Hisham was following a few of her school friends when she first viewed his profile.

Sometime in early November 2017, Hisham met the 11-year-old at the staircase landing in a building for the first time. At the location, he kissed the victim and committed sex acts on her.

Later in the same year, they met up another time, where the victim was picked up in Hisham’s motorcycle and he brought her to an open-air car park in Woodlands.

Once there, he shifted the victim to a covered lorry which belonged to the company he was working for, and joined her in the back.

They begin chatting, and at some point, Hisham took out a white crystalline substance and handed it to the victim. It was Methamphetamine, commercially known as “crystal meth” or “ice”.

He also handed her a glass apparatus and told her to smoke it. She complied, and Hisham later sexually assaulted her again before sending her back home.

His Offences Only Came to Light 3 Years Later

Following the incident in the back of the lorry, the relationship between the pair soured and they ceased contact with each other.

It was not until February 2020 where his offences were discovered. A case worker was conducting a session with the victim and it was there where she revealed that Hisham had sex with her back in 2017.

A police report was lodged, and authorities subsequently arrested Hisham.

Believe it or not, this wasn’t Hisham’s first victim. It was raised during court hearings that he had previously been sentenced to 10 months in jail back in 2016 for one count of sexual penetration of another minor.

The case Judge, Mavis Chiong, noted that the victim in the present case was even more vulnerable from the drugs given to her.

She also stated that his actions were “clearly premeditated and deviously planned”, seeing as he had scoured the internet and “zeroed in on the victim and her primary school friends on Instagram” before initiating a meetup.

The fact that he was also fully aware of her age and the fact that she was still studying in primary school was also taken into account during the sentencing. The judge determined that the initial proposed charge of 11 years imprisonment was insufficient seeing as his previous punishment in 2016 “did not teach him anything”.

Upon undergoing assessments from the Institute of Mental Health, Hisham was found to have met the criteria for paedophilic disorder, a condition where one is sexually attracted to children. He was said to be at a moderate overall risk of sexual reoffense and had an “alarming clear escalation” in his tendencies to commit such behaviour.

Image: Motortion Films / shutterstock.com