Terror of Yishun: Teen sex offender jailed 18 years after reoffending spree

In the late 1990s a 16-year-old student became known across his Yishun housing estate as the "Terror of Yishun". Over a spree of offences around his neighbourhood he molested several young children and a woman in her forties, repeatedly exposed himself to residents, and — in the detail that unsettled the public most — burned a two-year-old girl with a lighted cigarette.

On 28 January 1999 he was convicted on a long list of sexual offences together with charges of theft and voluntarily causing hurt. Despite his lawyer's plea for probation for the bright secondary-school student, the court sent him to reformative training for three years, accepting that the range and cruelty of his conduct ruled out a lighter path.

His release did not end it. In 2002, then a 19-year-old junior-college student, he pleaded guilty to four further charges of sexually assaulting and outraging the modesty of girls aged nine and eleven. On 5 August 2002 the High Court sentenced him to 18 years' imprisonment and 12 strokes of the cane, with Chief Justice Yong Pung How upholding the district judge's view that a young man who had squandered a second chance to prey again on children deserved no leniency (Public Prosecutor v Siddharth Mujumdar [2002] SGHC 172). It remains one of the darkest entries in Yishun's record.

• 28 Jan 1999eresources.nlb.gov.sg
• 05 Aug 2002elitigation.sg