CRIME | Man detained for ‘sextorting’ teen girls over thousands of nude photos

The Judiciary Police (PJ) will hand a 22 year-old-
man to the Public Prosecution Office today after he was alleged to have extorted multiple local teenage girls after obtaining pictures of them naked. The police found more than 1,000 images and video files in the suspect’s computer depicting nude young women. The suspect is a member of the local security forces, but PJ didn’t reveal his identity or the organisation for which he works.
The authorities first received a report on December 21 from an 18-year-old local female student who claimed that a man she did not know possessed some nude photos of her and had tried to coerce her into having sex with him. He also threatened that he would publish the photos on the Internet if she did not comply. PJ then asked the woman to meet the man as demanded and intercepted the suspect at a restaurant.
After he was taken back to the PJ headquarters, the man admitted that he had opened multiple accounts on Facebook, pretending to be a female model looking to exchange modeling pictures. He added multiple teenage girls as his friends on those accounts. The man then sent the victims a number of pictures of naked women he found on the Internet in order to lure them into sending him their own nude photos.
After collecting the naked images from the young girls, the man approached his victims through the mobile instant messaging application WeChat. He would tell the girls that he was in possession of their nude photos and demanded them to send even more of their photos to him. It is alleged that the suspect would even demand some of his victims to have sex with him.
Although the man admitted to having committed the extortion, he denied having had any sexual interaction with his victims. As the PJ could not detain the man under such a circumstance, he was freed.
Nevertheless, the authorities have continued to investigate the case and have taken some electronic equipment from the suspect’s house, including his computer. PJ officers found almost 1,700 obscene image or video files of teenage girls. Among those files, PJ found that there were names attached to 161 of them. The authorities then tried to track down those victims and confirmed that 78 of them were students, of which 34 were willing to give their account to the PJ.
They all claimed that they were extorted by a person who requested even more nude photos. Four of the victims – all of whom are under the age of 17 – even went so far as to claim that they had agreed to meet the suspect and were taken to an unspecific location before being sexually assaulted, with one of them being raped.
After gathering statements from the victims, PJ has requested the suspect to come to their headquarters again on Sunday. He admitted to having sexually extorted young girls with multiple Facebook accounts and confessed that he had sexually assaulted six female students and had sexual intercourse with another three.
Since PJ believes that there are more victims who were yet to be identified by the authorities, it has called on anyone who was extorted in a similar manner to come forward and contact the PJ through the hotline 8800 1346.
The PJ will charge the suspect with multiple offences including rape, sexual coercion, sexually assaulting a child, as well as the sexual assault and raping of an underage person.

psp promises impartial handling of alleged taxi assault

A spokesperson from the Public Security Police (PSP) told the Times that they will be impartial when investigating cases where taxi drivers were alleged to have assaulted passengers.
It is reported yesterday that after a passenger reported an alleged assault by a taxi driver to the police, she was told that there would be “no consequences.”  When asked about the incident, the PSP spokesperson said that will have to further investigate the case before making any specific comments. However, he suggested that cases like this usually involved both parties making accusations against each other. In situations like this, PSP will be taking statements from both parties according to typical procedure. “We will be handling the cases in a just and impartial manner,” he said.