Police in Pangkalpinang, Bangka Belitung province are on the hunt for a man caught on camera sexually assaulting a little girl in a mosque.
CCTV cameras at the mosque captured the heinous crime on May 17. In a widely circulating video, the man is seen walking into the women’s section of the mosque during evening prayer. He then approached a girl, whose mother was praying in front of her, and sexually assaulted her while they were both fully clothed.
Following the assault, the man, aware that he was being recorded, gave the camera the middle finger before leaving the scene.
“The victim, while crying, told her parents what had happened, and the parents reported the incident to the mosque management,” Adi Putra, who heads the Crime Investigation Unit at the Pangkalpinang Police, said.
Police have yet to identify the assailant, but the incident has triggered immense outrage nationwide that a member of parliament is leading calls for the man to be chemically castrated if he’s caught.
“The assailant must be punished in the most severe manner, both for ruining a child’s future and tainting a house of worship,” National Awakening Party (PKB) politician Jazilul Fawaid said today.
In 2016, President Joko Widodo signed a Perppu (Presidential Regulation In Lieu of Law) introducing the death penalty and chemical castration for convicted child molesters, which was ratified into law that same year by the House of Representatives (DPR). Since then, two people have been sentenced to chemical castration, but their punishments have been delayed as the Indonesian Doctors Association (IDI) have refused to be the designated executioner on the grounds that the procedure violates medical ethics.
Rights groups have criticized the policy, saying that temporarily taking away child molesters’ sexual desires will not solve the problem in the long run.
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