This call was made by the prosecution on Thursday when it pushed for jail sentences of between two and six months for a Christian couple convicted of distributing and possessing seditious publications.

Calling the offences of Ong Kian Cheong, 50, and his 46-year-old wife, Dorothy Chan Hien Leng, calculated, meticulous and methodical, deputy public prosecutors Anandan Bala and Sharmila Sripathy-Shanaz said it was imperative that an 'unequivocal message be sent'.

DPP Bala said the couple's distribution of highly offensive and insulting comic tracts to Muslims and other non-Christians bore all the hallmarks of grossly irresponsible and callous evangelisation, and had the potential to seriously undermine and threaten Singapore's multi-religious society.

Sending them to jail, he added, would also 'deter others from behaving in a manner that can create disharmony and discord between the different classes of people living in Singapore'.

Ong, a SingTel technical officer, and Chan, an associate director of Swiss bank UBS, were found guilty last week of four charges of sedition after an 11-day trial.

They had distributed two publications, The Little Bride and Who Is Allah?, to two Muslims.

Both publications tended to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between Christians and Muslims in Singapore.

They were also found to have distributed The Little Bride to another Muslim in 2007, even though they knew the publication was likely to cause feelings of enmity, hatred, ill-will or hostility between the two religious groups.

The couple were also found to have had 439 copies of 11 seditious tracts at their Maplewoods condominium in Bukit Timah on Jan 30 last year, the day of their arrest.

Over two decades, Ong and Chan, who had attended the Berean Christian Church in Havelock Road, distributed over 20,000 evangelistic tracts to the public.

Read the full story in Friday's edition of the Straits Times.