SINGAPORE — He asked young girls he had befriended on social media to send him explicit pictures or meet him in person, and also sexually assaulted a 14-year-old girl in his bedroom.

When AR Arun Prashanth was eventually arrested in early 2017, police found 720 upskirt photographs on his mobile phone. More than half of them were taken within one-and-a-half hours on Oct 4, 2016.

For his actions, the 25-year-old was sentenced to two years’ jail on Tuesday (Aug 13).

Arun, who is now unemployed, committed the offences when he was 22 years old and serving his National Service with the police.

He lied to one girl that he was a police officer, telling her in a text message: “Don’t worry GPS. Your parents probably lied to you. Trust me. I’m a police. It’s illegal to track someone. And using normal phone you can’t track someone.”

On July 31, he pleaded guilty to seven assorted charges, including sexual penetration of a minor and committing an indecent act with a young person. 

For sentencing, 21 other similar charges were taken into consideration. This included an offence committed sometime between 2014 and 2015, when he sexually penetrated another girl aged about 14. No further details were given in court documents.

All of his victims cannot be named due to a court order to protect their identities.

In mitigation, his lawyers, Mr Edmond Pereira and Ms Harjeet Kaur, said that Arun pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity and was a first-time offender.

They sought 20 months’ imprisonment instead, and told the court that Arun began chatting with others online to escape from his verbally abusive father, following his mother’s death about a decade ago.

A psychiatrist found him to have symptoms of depression, while his offences did not “appear to arise from a paraphilic disorder (abnormal sexual fetishes or impulses)” either, the lawyers added.

WHAT HE DID

The court previously heard that in early 2016, Arun began contacting a 12-year-old girl on Instagram. He sent her lewd messages on the phone several times a day, even though she reminded him of his age.

One of his messages to the girl read: “You underage. So if we ever do it, you must keep it your biggest secret.”

After he pestered her to send him naked photos of herself, she finally relented and sent him a photo of herself clad only in her bra. When he asked her to remove it, she refused to do so.

Then in September 2016, Arun began chatting with a 14-year-old girl. He asked for her age, then pestered her to meet up but she rejected all of his requests.

She eventually blocked him on WhatsApp, but he continued to send her messages on Instagram.

Then on Feb 3, 2017, she sent him a message saying that she wanted to skip her co-curricular activities. When he asked her to visit him at his home, she agreed and unblocked him on WhatsApp to facilitate the meeting.

When she arrived, he led her to his bedroom and sat her on the lower bunk of his double-decker bed. He told her to hide under the bed if anyone came home.

He then lay beside her and performed a number of sexual acts on her. She kept quiet as she was worried he would ask her more questions.

He also tried to get her to perform a sex act on him, but she did not.

When he left the bedroom, she got dressed and sent four messages by phone to her friend, asking the friend to call the police.