A university graduate with a criminal record for sexual harassment in the mainland was arrested on Wednesday for the same crime involving a local schoolboy in the city’s northern district, the Judiciary Police (PJ) said in a statement yesterday.
The suspect is a jobless 24-year-old local man surnamed Lam.
According to the statement, PJ officers were notified by a middle school in the northern district through the School Safety Network last Friday that a male junior middle school pupil had been approached by a man who touched his ankle when he was on his way back to school at noon that day.
The statement emphasised that the Judiciary Police attached great importance to the incident and immediately dispatched officers to investigate. Thanks to CCTV footage from the scene and nearby shops, PJ officers identified Lam and detained him in the northern district on Wednesday when he was taken to a police station for further investigation.
Under questioning, Lam told the police that he graduated from a university in the mainland this year and returned to Macau in May. He admitted that he deliberately committed the sexual harassment last Friday and revealed that he served a one-year prison term for sexual harassment in the mainland. He also confessed that he had committed the same kind of crime about 10 times since his return to Macau in May, according to the statement.
Lam was transferred to the Public Prosecutions Office (MP) yesterday, facing a sexual harassment charge.
According to Article 164-A of the Macau Penal Code, sexual harassment involves unwanted “physical contact of a sexual nature”. The crime is punishable by up to one year behind bars.
According to the statement, the head of the Judiciary Police’s Youth Concern Group, Chu Wai Man, pointed out that the rapid detection of the case this time was due to the pupil’s “courage” to seek help from the school. The case also reflected the effectiveness of the School Safety Network’s communication mechanism, the statement pointed out.
The statement also noted that the case has been reported to schools in the northern district and PJ officers were continuing their investigations to see if more teenagers were sexually harassed by the suspect.
Chu underlined that there have been 27 sexual harassment investigated by the police since 2019, of which five cases involved minors. She stressed that the five cases have been solved.
The police urged minors to be “brave enough” to come forward when they have been sexually harassed, according to the statement.
The hooded suspect is escorted by Judiciary Police (PJ) officers from the PJ headquarters in Zape to a vehicle yesterday. Photo courtesy TDM
The handout photo provided by the Judiciary Police (PJ) shows Chu Wai Man, who heads the PJ Youth Concern Group, talking to the media outside the PJ headquarters in Zape yesterday.
