SINGAPORE: The Singaporean teenager behind online attacks on former premier Lee Kuan Yew was given a four-week jail term Monday but freed in view of time served since being accused of offending Christians and posting an obscene image.

Amos Yee, 16, was jailed for three weeks for wounding religious feelings in an expletive-laden YouTube video comparing Lee Kuan Yew to Jesus, which was posted after the independence leader’s death in March.

He also received a one-week jail term for posting an obscene drawing of Lee and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

District Court judge Jasvender Kaur backdated the sentence to June 2, when Yee was already in remand, saying the offenses “were not serious in nature but not trivial either.”

Yee, who was earlier shackled on his hands and feet in court, looked dazed and frightened as he left the court. He did not speak to reporters.

Yee’s lawyer Alfred Dodwell told reporters his client wants to appeal the conviction.

Yee had faced an extended period behind bars. The maximum penalty for wounding racial or religious feelings is three years.

Rights groups criticized the city-state for arresting Yee and sympathizers staged rallies in Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan to demand the boy’s freedom ahead of the sentencing. Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, told AFP he saw the backdated sentence as a “face-saving way for Singapore to say they were not wrong for prosecuting him when in fact the whole world community knows that they were.”

A spokeswoman for Singapore’s Attorney General’s Chambers (AGC) rebutted criticism from Robertson and other international rights activists that the city-state was curtailing freedom of speech by prosecuting Yee.

“This case is not about freedom of expression. It is about the abuse of such freedom. Unbridled speech without limits does not exist in any known society,” she told AFP.