SINGAPORE: A Singapore court sentenced a teacher to 32 years in prison and 24 strokes of the cane yesterday after he confessed to repeatedly raping five of his 33 daughters.
The Muslim businessman (45), who also has 33 sons and 10 wives, and cannot be named to protect the victims, persuaded his wives to allow the abuse by distorting sections of the Koran so they thought he had ownership of his children to the extent that he could have sex with them.
He was charged with only 43 offences of rape, aggravated rape and attempted rape from December 2003 to November 2005 because those were the occasions for which the victims, aged between 12 and 15 at the time, could remember the details.
"The incidents of abuse were so numerous that they were hard-pressed to keep count, much less remember the exact specifics of each incident," deputy public prosecutor Eugene Lee was quoted as saying during the hearing last week.
The defendant pleaded guilty to nine of the charges under a plea bargain. His lawyer, Harold Seet, told the Guardian that his client acted as he did "because he was troubled by financial matters and his daughters' interest in the opposite sex.
"He said he would prefer to do the act with his daughters so they would not do it with any third parties," Mr Seet said.
The court was told that the man would order one of his wives to summon one of the girls to go to his bedroom where he would have sex with them even if they cried out in pain.
Two of the girls became pregnant. A 14-year-old had an abortion in Singapore last year but when a second became pregnant two months later the man and some of his wives took her to neighbouring Indonesia, where abortion is illegal, for the operation to ensure the man's name did not come up in records.
The girls' ordeal ended last June when one of the daughters, aged 16, reported her father to the police. They called him and he surrendered the following day.