SINGAPORE — A 50-year-old Korean man was sentenced to seven weeks imprisonment today (Sept 29) for shooting upskirt videos of shoppers in a supermarket. 

Lee Bok Yeon, then a general manager, admitted to four charges of insulting the modesty of a woman by taking an upskirt video. Seven other charges were taken into consideration. His misdeeds came to light after a victim's boyfriend caught him in the act. 

At about 3.30pm on May 10, the victim, a 25-year-old whose name has been withheld to protect her identity, was shopping with her boyfriend at NTUC FairPrice Finest at Bukit Timah Plaza. As she was bending over to pick vegetables, her boyfriend noticed that Lee followed, and placed his shopping basket near her. 

Sensing something amiss, he approached Lee and saw that his shopping basket contained two handphones, one of which had its camera lens facing upwards. 

He confronted Lee, who denied that he had taken any upskirt videos of the victim, and grabbed one of the handphones. A scuffle ensued, and the handphone fell onto the floor. The victim's boyfriend then passed the handphone to the security guard, who returned it to Lee. 

Lee ran away and was eventually detained by the boyfriend and other members of the public. Upon being nabbed, he threw his handphone down and smashed it, so that it could not be turned on. 

Investigations later showed that he had taken upskirt videos of at least three other women in the same supermarket between May 9 and 10. The modus operandi was similar in all these cases: Lee would turn on the recording function on his handphone, leave it in his shopping basket, and then place the basket near the hem of his victim's dress or on the floor. 

Claiming that he was "out of (his) mind" in court today, Lee said: "At that moment, I didn't think of any consequences. I did not realise the significance of my actions." 

"I'm very shameful and very sorry to my family. Because of my actions, they're suffering a lot," he added, wiping his eyes as he spoke. He has lost his job since the incident. 

Delivering the sentence, District Judge Jasvender Kaur said that Lee's crimes were neither "isolated", nor "spur-of-the-moment”. 

"You pretended to be a shopper and put your handphone in your basket to take upskirt videos... When caught in the act, you tried to destroy the evidence by smashing the handphone," she said.