Rape: Monsters in Our Midst
“ By not coming forward, you make yourself a victim forever.”
Kelly McGillis,
Actress
THE LAW IN SINGAPORE has a very specific and technical criterion to qualify whether rape has occurred: when a man penetrates a woman’s vagina with his penis without her consent. A man cannot be raped; if any other orifice is breached with anything other than the penis, it is not rape but “unlawful sexual penetration”. Both offences are punishable by up to 20 years in jail plus a fine or caning.
The statistic for the number of rape cases is not in the public domain, but instead lumped together with “crimes against persons”, of which there were 3,808 cases in 2013 according to figures from the Singapore Police Force, representing a 0.4 per cent drop from 2012.
But even if there were figures to go by, their significance is blunted by the high degree of under-reporting due to the very nature of the crime. The shame and social stigma, particularly in cases where the rapist is a friend or even a family member, conspire to make rape an even more heinous crime endured in silence.
Nevertheless, targeted surveys can help one to form a picture. Between February and May 2009, the International Violence Against Women Survey commissioned by the National University of Singapore canvassed the views of 2,006 women between age 18 and 69, through a random sampling of Singapore households.
Here are some of the survey’s findings:
• 9.2 per cent of those surveyed had experienced at least one incident of violence by a man in their adult lifetime (i.e. from age 16).
• 5 per cent experienced physical violence; 2.3 per cent experienced sexual violence; 1.9 per cent experienced both physical and sexual violence.
• There is no statistically significant difference in the rate of violence between women from different ethnic groups, household income, those in the labour force or those with a personal income.
• Of the cases of intimate partner violence reported to the police, 12 per cent resulted in charges and conviction.
• Of the cases of non-partner violence reported to the police, 9.1 per cent resulted in charges and conviction.
Tan Jun Hui, 27, was unemployed and an ex-convict with theft and criminal breach of trust on his record. He was married with a young 5-year-old daughter and was comparatively young to have a family of his own by that age. That day, he celebrated his wife’s birthday with the family; it was a joyous occasion and the drinking started from 7pm.
Tan continued for a second round of drinks, joining his friends at a KTV lounge in Geylang. It wasn’t just the alcohol. In these KTV lounges, the singing has more in common with a mating ritual than a talent show or a way to blow off steam. There are hostesses, drinks and drinking games of the type adults might find amusing — it is a carnival of intoxication and flirtation.
All liquored up and with his nerves on edge, Tan would have done better to return home, but he wasn’t done yet.
At 3am in the morning, Tan found himself halfway across Singapore at Choa Chu Kang Street 51, finishing a cigarette beside his parked car. It was in the heartlands, with no neon lights and very little traffic. It was very quiet, as most residents in the public housing estate were likely asleep. Unlike Tan, many had to rise for work in a matter of hours.
It was then that Tan spotted Alice (not her real name, which is withheld by a court order), a 21-year-old prison officer, coming out of a taxi. She had been to a friend’s place in Pasir Ris and was on her way home where she lived with her parents on the second floor.
Seeing Alice alone, Tan decided to rob her. He grabbed a knife from his car and rushed towards the lift landing where Alice was entering the lift. As the lift doors were about to close, Tan dashed in and pressed the button for the ninth floor, the highest level in the block.
Although it was only a short ride to the second floor, it would be the longest ride for Alice.
Just as she was about to walk out of the lift when the doors opened on the second floor, Tan grabbed her from behind and pulled her back into the lift.
She screamed, but Tan was quick to draw his knife and threatened her in Mandarin: “Do not shout! This is a robbery!”
Alice was staring down a knife with a 13cm blade and had no choice but to hand over the $200 in cash that she had to Tan. All this took place as the lift ascended at an unhurried pace towards the ninth floor.
When the lift doors finally opened, Tan put his hand over Alice’s mouth to prevent her from screaming and dragged her to a staircase landing between the eighth and ninth floor. There, he robbed her of two mobile phones, valued at $700 in total. Not bad for less than an hour’s dishonest work, but Tan had other appetites to satisfy. He forcibly removed Alice’s t-shirt, unhooked her bra and ordered her to give him oral sex. When Alice resisted, he stood her up again and removed her shorts and panties. She tried to resist but Tan wielded his knife and she submitted when he threatened her again. He then forced her to lie down on the floor and spread her legs, and proceeded to rape her, mere metres from the residential units a floor above and below them. No alarm was raised, not even when Tan shouted at Alice to comply, and no help was forthcoming.
Halfway through the rape, Alice offered to masturbate Tan because she did not want his semen inside her. Tan agreed. In the end, he ejaculated into his own underwear, and after ordering Alice to close her eyes, he fled the scene. The entire episode had taken no more than 10 minutes.
Shocked and battered, Alice dressed herself, picked up the knife that Tan had left behind and ran home. There, she told her parents what had happened and they immediately reported the matter to the police.
In the meantime, life proceeded as normal for Tan. He got an acquaintance to sell the two phones he had taken from Alice — for $300, less than half of their value, but it was easy money which he spent on petrol, cigarettes and food.
But the police picked up the trail of the phones, which led right back to Tan. Ten days after his crime, Tan was arrested. His DNA matched that at the crime scene, the knife and on the victim’s clothes.
Three years later, on 24 April 2013, Tan was sentenced to 4 years’ jail and 12 strokes of the cane for armed robbery, and 10 years’ jail and 12 strokes of the cane each for rape and attempted unlawful sexual penetration. As the latter two sentences were run concurrently, Tan was sentenced to a total of 14 years in jail and 24 strokes of the cane. At the time of the trial, it was reported that the victim was still suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. She constantly experienced nightmares and flashbacks of the horrific night, as well as palpitations and was easily startled, especially by footsteps behind her.
If there is one dubious achievement that Azuar Ahamad can call his own, it’s how he took on multiple personas and lied his way to drugging, raping and sexually assaulting 22 women ranging in age from 18 to 41, over a period of 14 months between July 2008 and August 2009.
It wasn’t that Azuar was a particularly wily criminal. In fact, he actually exposed himself to unnecessary risks of getting caught, almost as if that was what he wanted, or perhaps he had such an inflated belief in his own invincibility. Already an ex-convict, Azuar continued to commit crimes after serving his sentence, and when he was arrested, he would attract even more attention by committing the same crimes again while out on bail!
But even when he was eventually caught, it is not far-fetched to say that he was caught by accident. Had he been a little more careful, he could have evaded the law a while longer, to dupe even more women and maybe even include blackmail among his list of felonies.
Dubbed the “Facebook Rapist” by some media, Azuar used social networking sites to cast a wider net for sexual entrapment. In particular, he used the Facebook app SpeedDate to seek out his victims.
He would invent new personas of himself to target women. Using various names such as “Denny Azar”, “Denny Susanto”, “Shawn Rozario Tan”, “Shawn Tan” and “Terrence Shawn Tan”, he posed as a dentist, student and business professional. His personas were either Chinese or Eurasian — anything but Azuar Ahamad, the logistics company executive that he truly was. In fact, even his real-life logistics job was gotten through deceit, by forging one of his ex-wife’s ‘O’ and ‘A’ level certificates.
Azuar was in his element, crafting imaginary identities and abilities to get women interested in him, and made up stories about going on overseas business trips or further studies as a pretext for asking them out for drinks.
This was how he had been reaching out to women since 2006, making new acquaintances at a rate of 10 to 20 women each month and amassing the contact numbers of between 100 to 200 women. He was also intimate with more than 50 of them.
Considering this scale of social engagement, it is less surprising then, that Azuar was able to ensnare no less than 22 women in his nefarious schemes.
He would arrange to meet his victims at night spots and spike their drinks with a cocktail of cough syrup and sleeping pills in an alcoholic shot. While they were unconscious, he took them to hotels where he would rape or sexually assault them, often filming himself carrying out these acts with his phone. After that, he would send the women home, who would wake up the next morning, none the wiser.
Some would call him since they couldn’t remember a thing about their date the night before, only to be fed more lies. Azuar would claim that they had sex, or that they had gotten drunk and that he had to check them into hotels to clean them up before sending them home. But there were also some women who got suspicious and went to the police.
An episode that throws some light on Azuar’s modus operandi involves banking executive Tan Hui Ling, who was 29 when the incident took place on 27 October 2008. Tan can be identified because she was not sexually assaulted by Azuar, although he certainly did try.
Tan and Azuar had met at a roadshow the day before and arranged to meet the following day at a cafe at Junction 8 in Bishan. To Tan, Azuar was a prospective customer and she was there to discuss the insurance products that she was selling. Unknown to her, Azuar had no purchases in mind.
After consuming drinks that Azuar insisted on buying, Tan excused herself to go to the washroom, where she called her then-boyfriend Lee Jun Jep, complaining that she felt light-headed. She even joked that her drink might have been spiked, before returning to her table.
Unknown to Azuar, Lee was waiting for Tan at a nearby table. When he saw her get up and walk unsteadily out of the cafe with Azuar holding her, he sensed that something was wrong and approached them.
Tan was still able to recognise Lee and put her hand on his chest, asking for a cigarette. Azuar didn’t know Lee and told him she had the wrong person. But he was shocked when Lee told him he was Tan’s boyfriend. He promptly handed Lee his girlfriend’s handbag and mobile phone and left them. Lee immediately drove Tan to the hospital.
Taking the witness stand, Lee testified in court that Tan was walking unsteadily, mumbling incoherently and staring blankly into space. She lost consciousness in the car on the way to the hospital, and only woke after he blasted the stereo, shouted at her, shook her hard and slapped her face repeatedly.
But Tan remembered none of this. Her last memory of the entire incident was returning to her seat at the cafe after going to the toilet. She also remembered being at the hospital and being passed a bottle for her urine test. According to Lee, she had asked him while at the hospital, “What am I doing here? What happened? Where is this place?”
Had they not been intercepted by her boyfriend, Tan would most certainly have ended up in a hotel with Azuar as victim No. 23.
But others were not so lucky.
Claiming to be a business coordinator leaving for the US soon to further his studies, Azuar invited a 38-year-old business assistant out for drinks.
After a few drinks, she lost consciousness and woke up in a hotel room wearing only her panties, with Azuar lying beside her in his boxers. Still ill, she went to the toilet to throw up and also had diarrhoea, before Azuar sent her home.
When she was well enough to ask Azuar what had happened on their date, he told her that she had gotten very drunk and had vomited all over her clothes. He had no choice but to check them into a hotel to clean her up, and also removed her bra so that she would feel more comfortable.
Not remembering that she had been raped, the victim was embarrassed by the details fabricated by Azuar and stopped asking questions.
Sometime in 2009, a 31-year-old bank officer was chatting online with Denny Azhar and Shawn Tan, unaware that they were actually one and the same person.
Shawn invited her for drinks at a bar, and she even mentioned it to Denny, who said he too would be in the area. Of course Azuar couldn’t be two persons at the same time and place, so Shawn cancelled on the bank officer that night, and it was left to Denny to fill the vacated slot.
Denny and the bank officer had drinks, and sometime in the evening, Denny poured an alcoholic shot for the bank officer. All the latter could remember after drinking the shot was feeling “drowsy and giddy”.
Azuar then led her out of the bar and checked them both into a hotel at Telok Blangah. There, he filmed himself groping her breasts, touching her privates and raping her without a condom.
When she woke up in the morning at her friend’s place, she tried calling Azuar to ask what had happened but he told her that he was in church. Later, he told her that after she got drunk, he hailed a taxi for her but she threw up on both of them in the cab. The taxi driver ordered them out, so he had no choice but to check them into a hotel to clean up. Seeing that she was properly attired when she woke up and feeling no pain in her groin area, the victim reasoned that nothing untoward had happened and shrugged off the matter.
A credit card bill from the hotel for $105 was later sent to her, but as the signature did not match hers, she didn’t have to pay.
Azuar tried to ask her out again, but she turned him down.
He introduced himself as Shawn Tan, told her that he was a dentist who was soon on his way to the US for further studies, and asked to meet. She lost consciousness after drinks and they ended up in a hotel on Lavender Street, where Azuar filmed himself raping her, before checking out at 2am and sending her home.
As the other victims, she woke up in her own home, without any recollection of what had happened. When she called him to ask, Azuar told her that she had kissed him while drunk and given him oral sex. But she couldn’t remember any of it, so she dropped the matter.
Azuar contacted her yet again, pretending to be calling from overseas and asking to catch up since he would be back in Singapore for a wedding. They did meet up again, but he touched her while they were in a taxi and she stopped seeing him after that.
Azuar arranged to meet an insurance agent at a club. There, he purposely spilt his drink on her top. When she returned from tidying up in the washroom, the proper thing for Azuar to do was to compensate her with another drink. When she lost consciousness after downing it, Azuar sent her home and filmed himself molesting her. When she woke up and found that she was not wearing any underwear, Azuar fed her the usual load of lies when she asked him about it.
Just as Azuar cooked up fantasy stories about himself to ensnare his victims, he also lied to doctors to milk them for sleeping pill prescriptions.
In many cases, he told them he was a policeman on the security detail of the nation’s VIPs. He told a particular doctor that he was from the elite Special Tactics and Rescue (STAR) unit of the Singapore Police Force, and that he was the personal bodyguard of then Deputy Prime Minister Wong Kan Seng.
As such a job entailed long hours, shift work and a mountain of stress, he needed pills to keep his insomnia at bay.
He would even confide in some of the doctors that he had been suffering from depression ever since his wife was killed in a traffic accident. In some versions, his child also died in the same accident, leaving him alone in the world.
In actual fact, Azuar was married twice — both his wives are alive, and so is his daughter.
But his ruse worked. Trim, well-dressed and a good storyteller, Azuar amassed some 500 sleeping pills (mainly Dormicum and Stilnox) from seven general practitioners. None of the doctors knew that other doctors had also been prescribing sleeping pills to Azuar — Singapore’s Central Drug Prescribing Registry does not track the dispensing details of Dormicum and its family of drugs.
Notably, one of the doctors who testified during the case, Dr Barry Thng of My Family Clinic in Choa Chu Kang, told the court that he did not stock these two fast-acting drugs because Dormicum in particular was known to be used in date rapes.
According to a pharmacist at the Institute of Mental Health, people experience blackouts in several ways when drugged. The victims are likely still able to move but they will have no recollection past the point when the drugs take effect.
How did Azuar get this good at what he did? Not for lack of practice.
Back in 2003, Azuar was sentenced to six years in jail after pleading guilty to 21 charges, which included molest, threatening and spiking drinks.
In 2009, he was arrested thrice for spiking women’s drinks and outraging their modesty. At this time, the law had not yet caught on that Azuar was already a rapist.
On 1 February 2009, Azuar was arrested on suspicion of drugging a woman at a cafe in Bishan, and released on $30,000 bail. Five months later on 2 July, he was arrested for outrage of modesty, and released on $40,000 bail. A month later, he was arrested on 3 August for outraging the modesty of a woman at a hotel in Balestier.
It was only after this third arrest that bail was denied. His crimes had finally caught up with him; not so much due to dogged police work as the number of times he chose to bait the system. Prior to this, no one had cried rape and none of his victims could remember anything.
And he would have gotten away with it were it not for an accidental discovery. While Azuar remained behind bars, police officers happened to look through his two mobile phones (it was not stated why) and stumbled upon video recordings of him raping and sexually assaulting numerous women while they were unconscious. There were also many photos of naked, unconscious women.
At least twice, he raped his victims without wearing a condom. For each of the three women that he would eventually be convicted of raping, the videos on Azuar’s phone showed them lying on a bed with their eyes closed, utterly unresponsive as he raped them.
In the video of the fourth victim, the woman’s eyes were half closed and she was able to manage small movements, although she was in a stupor as she was assaulted by Azuar.
This digital loot led to further investigations, and the police managed to track down many of the women from the phones’ contact lists.
Some of the women did not realise that they had been victims of a sex crime until they saw themselves being violated in the videos.
On 6 August 2012, Azuar pleaded guilty to raping three women and sexually assaulting a fourth in 2009, with 30 other charges being taken into consideration during sentencing. These include two additional counts of rape, 14 counts of outrage of modesty, use of stupefying drugs, sexual assault by digital (finger) penetration, theft of ATM cards and cash amounting to $1,450, and possession of 40 illegal/obscene VCDs or DVDs.
At the time of writing, some two years after Azuar had been convicted of his charges, his trial continues in 2014 over the point of whether he had used drugs to subdue his victims before violating them. The rapes are not in dispute, but rather the matter of whether the victims passed out from drinks that he spiked, or from drinking themselves into a stupor.
Accusing him of using drugs to subdue his victims, the public prosecutor is asking for jail term of at least 45 years — the longest ever requested by the prosecution in a Singapore court.
However, with respect to his convictions, Azuar denies that he had drugged the four women. Instead, he insists that they had drunk themselves into a stupor, presenting him with the opportunity.
He was under the impression that they were willing to have sex with him. Via online chats before meeting up, he had discussed sexual matters with them, and this expectation of sex was strengthened when at least two of the women hugged and kissed him in person when they met up.
He admitted that he took the chance to assault the women while they were unconscious, but insists he did not drug them. He even admits that as the prosecution rightfully pointed out, he is a habitual liar. But not about using drugs to spike his victims’ drinks.
While in remand (he had been kept in jail since his third arrest in 2009 as the trial progressed), he told his psychiatrist that he knew rape was wrong, that it was “animalistic”. But he also maintained that he was arrested and jailed because he had spurned the advances of one of his victims.
Offering his analysis about Azuar’s recent willingness to voluntarily attend counselling while in prison, former Institute of Mental Health (IMH) psychiatrist John Bosco Lee was sceptical about Azuar’s true intentions and whether he was even experiencing remorse: “While I won’t discount his actions, I’ll be very careful…”
As Azuar had done throughout his life, this could merely be his way of portraying a particular image of himself.
Azuar was sentenced on 27 May 2014, to 37-and-a-half years in jail and 24 strokes of the cane.