8-11-2023 (SINGAPORE) A 25-year-old Singaporean man, Amos Yee, has been arrested and sent back to a maximum-security state prison in Illinois, USA, for child pornography offenses. Yee had been released on parole just a month ago, on October 7, after serving three years of a six-year sentence.
According to the VineLink mobile app, which notifies victims of crimes on the current status of offenders, Yee is now in the custody of the Stateville Correctional Centre. The reason for his re-incarceration is currently unknown.
Yee had previously been sentenced to six years’ jail at the Illinois River Correctional Centre, a medium-security state prison, for grooming a teenage girl and possessing child pornography. He had committed these offenses in February 2019, when he repeatedly asked a 14-year-old girl living in Texas to send him nude photos of herself, and engaged in role play and sexual fantasies with her. He had also exchanged thousands of messages with the girl.
The Chicago Sun-Times daily newspaper reported that the girl had mentioned her age multiple times in messages with Yee on WhatsApp, the messaging platform on which they communicated. Yee had instructed her to remove her age from her WhatsApp profile. He was eventually arrested in October 2020.
During his sentencing, Yee had an additional 16 other child pornography-related charges dismissed as part of a plea deal he accepted. He has also been listed on the sex offender registry due to his offenses. This means that his name, crime, and home address are made available to the public online.
In his October 23 blog post, Yee had stated that he planned to return to Singapore. In a subsequent post on November 5, he listed “6 Impressive Things I Want to Do”, with the goal of “(making) ‘defending pedophiles’ popular” up on the list.
Yee had fled Singapore in December 2016, a day before he was supposed to report for a medical examination ahead of his enlistment into national service. He was subsequently granted political asylum in the US in 2017 after citing persecution for his political opinions, following two separate incidents that led to him being jailed twice in Singapore.
In 2015, Yee was sentenced to four weeks’ jail for engaging in hate speech against Christians in a video he had posted on YouTube, as well as publishing an obscene image of former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew. The following year, he was charged with engaging in hate speech again after making derogatory comments about Christianity and Islam in videos and blog posts. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six weeks’ jail and a $2,000 fine.
