Indian-origin Singapore resident Prema S Naraynasamy, who was sentenced to 14 years in jail for fatally abusing her daughter's Myanmarese maid, today had an additional three years added to her punishment for removing crucial evidence in the case.
The 64-year-old will now serve a 17-year sentence for her role in abusing 24-year-old Myanmar national Piang Ngaih Don, who died of a brain injury with severe blunt trauma to her neck in 2016 after 14 months of repeated abuse.
Prema was given an additional three-year jail term for asking her son-in-law to remove a Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) recorder that held evidence of her 43-year-old daughter Gaiyathiri Murugayan and her crimes involving Piang's abuse.
Prema pleaded guilty to one count of instigating her son-in-law Kevin Chelvam to cause evidence of the offences to disappear, Channel News Asia reported today.
The offence, involving the CCTV recorder, occurred when Prema knew the authorities were heading to their house.
When Chelvam arrived home, Prema directed him to dismantle the CCTV recorder to dispose of it, as she did not want police to get hold of the footage.
Chelvam, 44, then a police officer, was initially reluctant to do so but allegedly complied with his mother-in-law's insistence.
Prema later slipped the recorder into her daughter-in-law's bag while the police were in the house and told her in Tamil, "I have kept something in your bag, do something with it."
The daughter-in-law gave Prema's son the recorder, who then asked a friend to keep it.
Despite the CCTV recorder passing from her daughter-in-law's hands to her son's friend, the police managed to recover it after questioning Prema's son.
District Judge Jill Tan said the background to the offence was "a series of unspeakably cruel abuses" committed by Prema and her daughter.
Gaiyathiri was sentenced to 30 years in jail in 2021 for her role in the case. Her appeal against her sentence was dismissed.