SINGAPORE - Two men were jailed on Monday (Sept 25) in separate cases of insulting the modesty of women.

Chinese national and former engineer Gu Wei Wei, 29, was jailed for six weeks after he admitted to two counts of using his iPhone to take an upskirt video of a woman at Cold Storage supermarket in Kovan Heartland Mall on April 29.

Three other similar charges were taken into consideration during sentencing.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Lee Zu Zhao said Gu, who is a Singapore permanent resident, had placed his mobile phone in a plastic bag and slit a horizontal opening at the side of it. He positioned the camera upwards, leaning it against the opening, and set it to video-recording mode.

Gu then approached an unknown woman and held the plastic bag underneath her skirt to take a video.

When he was walking along the second level of the mall, a 39-year-old housewife recognised him to be the person whom she had suspected of having taken an upskirt video of her some time in May last year.

She called her husband to come over while she continued to observe Gu from afar.

The husband saw Gu outside Cold Storage supermarket and decided to follow him.

He tailed Gu to Kovan market and food centre and saw him approach an unknown woman from the back while holding on to the plastic bag.

When Gu tried to shove the plastic bag near the woman's skirt, he was detained with the help of a passer-by and police were called.

In mitigation, Gu, who was unrepresented, told District Judge Adam Nakhoda that he had lost his job because of the offence and had brought shame to himself and his family.

Judge Nakhoda said the series of offences Gu committed that day did not appear to be the first time he had committed them. But since there was no charge against him in regard to the May 2016 incident, he did not take that into consideration.

The judge, however, noted that there was planning by Gu, who tried to conceal the fact that he was filming up the victims' skirts.

In another hearing on Monday, car salesman Jason Toh Han Soon, 33, was jailed for 18 weeks after he admitted to 13 charges of intruding into the privacy of a woman, with 25 other similar charges taken into consideration.

A total of 428 upskirt photographs, taken from Sept 22 to Dec 20 last year, was recovered from his phone.

He was detained by a 36-year-old woman on Dec 20 last year, when she saw him taking an upskirt photograph of an unknown woman on an escalator at Dhoby Ghaut MRT station, and called the police.

The maximum punishment for insulting the modesty of a woman is one year's jail and a fine.