30-year-old Hindakumbure Charindu Dilshan Rajapaksha, a Sri Lankan studying hospitality management in Singapore, distributed 17 video clips of explicit content involving children on a WhatsApp group that shares adult videos, where he was the administrator.
The man, who is married with a 3-year-old child, sent the videos out on 11 occasions over a period of four months.
He pleaded guilty on Thursday to a number of offences that include the distribution of explicit material involving children.
The prosecution described the contents of the video clips as scraping the “very pits of depravity” and involving children being raped and trafficked into explicit activities.
One of the videos even showed a child having intercourse with a farm animal.
Another Sri Lankan man, Kolambage Dhanushka Chamara Perera who was 25 at the time of the offence, was previously sentenced to 1-month imprisonment in February last year.
Hindakumbure and 6 of his roommates had created a WhatsApp group, “Wela”, between 2019 to 2020, and he was one of 7 people serving as an administrator.
The group also sent out invitations for other Sri Lankans to join.
Hindakumbure distributed 943 obscene videos from 16 March 2020 to 26 July 2020, of adults engaging in intercourse.
17 of the videos involved children.
The crimes came to light when a patrol officer with the Public Transport Security Command spotted Kolambage behaving suspiciously on 6 August 2020 at Lavender MRT station.
A check was conducted on him and found a group chat on his phone, with the display picture of a silhouette of 2 people having intercourse.
The officers opened the group chat and found more than 6,000 explicit content, including videos that featured children.
Kolambage was then arrested and his phone was seized.
Hindakumbure was later identified as one of the administrators of the group chat, and the police call him on 12 August to return to his home, where they checked his phone and found the group chat.
He was then arrested as well and his phone was also seized by officers. At the time, the group chat had 256 active participants.
Hindakumbure is set to return to court on 24 March for his sentencing.