A 63-year-old chef in Singapore has been handed an 8½-year prison sentence after admitting to the sexual assault of an 11-year-old girl, an incident that unfolded within a busy restaurant setting despite the presence of multiple witnesses. Kassim Juhamat, who pleaded guilty before the High Court on Wednesday, August 26, was convicted on one charge of sexual assault by penetration. The court also took into account three additional charges related to the same occasion in June 2025—two counts of molesting the child and one charge involving an obscene act—during the determination of his sentence.
The severity of Kassim's conduct lay not merely in the nature of the offence itself but in the brazen manner of its execution. The assault persisted for approximately thirty minutes while restaurant staff members and patrons continued their routines in the vicinity. The sentence incorporates six months of imprisonment in lieu of caning, a substitution made necessary by the offender's age; Singapore law prohibits the caning of individuals above 50 years old, rendering him ineligible for this form of corporal punishment typically applied in such cases.
According to Deputy Public Prosecutor Mavis Ng's account to the court, the victim had developed a casual familiarity with Kassim through her occasional visits to the restaurant, where she had become acquainted with another individual whose identity remains protected by court order. The relationship between the girl and this person cannot be disclosed in order to safeguard the victim's privacy and identity, a protection measure commonly invoked in cases involving minors. Through this connection, the child came to know the offender on a social level, addressing him informally as "Uncle Kassim," a culturally common form of address in Southeast Asia that nonetheless underscores the misplaced trust the girl had in the perpetrator.
On the afternoon of June 27, 2025, at approximately 4.15pm, the girl entered the restaurant and positioned herself at a table where Kassim was seated and resting. The immediate surroundings contained both staff members and other patrons, a fact that makes the subsequent events all the more disturbing in its casualness. The initial interaction appeared innocuous—the victim requested that Kassim scratch an itchy spot on her lower back, a simple favour one might ask of a familiar adult. However, this benign request became the pretext for escalating sexual misconduct.
Once he had scratched the specified area, Kassim progressively violated the child's boundaries by sliding his hand beneath her shirt and directly proposing further contact with her chest. The girl repeatedly and unambiguously refused, vocalising her objection and physically withdrawing from his advances by leaning away. Despite these clear rejections, Kassim deployed his other hand to continue the unwanted touching. When the victim attempted to leave the table, he physically restrained her by gripping her hand firmly and forced a kiss upon her mouth, a violation that occurred while they remained seated in full view of other restaurant occupants.
The assault intensified as Kassim placed his hand inside the girl's clothing while she remained at the table, proceeding to sexually penetrate her. He then forcibly took the child's hand and compelled her to engage in an obscene act against her explicit wishes. The prosecutor recounted the victim's experience of disgust and her desperate attempts to retract her hand, efforts that proved futile against Kassim's iron grip. When Kassim later asked the girl whether she wished to touch him, she again stated "no," a refusal he finally accepted by releasing her hand at approximately 5pm—nearly an hour after the initial innocuous request for a back scratch.
Before permitting the traumatised child to depart, Kassim imposed a command of silence, instructing her not to disclose the assault to anyone. The girl initially intended to report the incident to her mother immediately upon leaving the restaurant, but exhaustion overcame her and she fell asleep before she could communicate what had transpired. The following day, when the victim returned to the restaurant—a detail that speaks to the complex psychology of child trauma and the difficulty victims face in immediately processing and reporting violations—the individual through whom she knew Kassim observed her altered demeanour and questioned the change in her behaviour towards the offender.
It was only then, prompted by the observation of her distress, that the girl disclosed to this individual what Kassim had perpetrated. The individual subsequently confronted the chef directly. Initially, Kassim adopted a position of denial, refusing to acknowledge the victim's allegations. His resistance crumbled, however, when the individual threatened to both report the matter to police authorities and examine the restaurant's closed-circuit television recording, which would have provided irrefutable video evidence of the assault. The prospect of documented visual proof convinced Kassim to abandon his denials and confess to his actions.
Once management at the restaurant became aware of the assault through this confrontation, one of the establishment's managers took the responsibility of lodging an official police report on the victim's behalf, an action that initiated the formal criminal investigation. Kassim was apprehended on June 29, 2025, merely two days after the incident, and has remained in police custody continuously since his arrest. His swift incarceration and the subsequent court proceedings have resulted in one of the more substantial sentences handed down in recent Singapore cases involving child sexual abuse, reflecting the courts' serious approach to protecting vulnerable minors from predatory behaviour by trusted adults.
