A 27-year-old man has been fired from his government job and jailed for two years after being convicted of having oral sex with a teenage girlfriend.

Police charged Annis Abdullah, formerly a sergeant with the Singapore police coastguard, after receiving a complaint from the girl. Abdullah was convicted under a section of the Singapore penal code that prohibits "carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal".

But Abdullah might be considered to have got off lightly. The law, which also makes homosexuality a crime in Singapore, provides a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.

In a city not famous for dissent, the first prosecution for oral sex in more than six years has sparked indignation in newspaper letters columns, on radio and in internet chat rooms.

"Both Singaporeans and foreigners often joke about Singapore being a 'fine' city, and its ban on chewing gum. Is the law against oral sex going to be the next butt of jokes?" wrote Francis Lim to the New Straits Times newspaper.

The case has also drawn criticism from Singapore medical experts, some of whom have estimated that 60 per cent of married couples are nocturnal law-breakers. "Oral sex is part and parcel of intimacy and sex," said Professor Li Man Kay, a urologist and sex therapist at Gleneagles Hospital.

The public outcry is a setback to recent Government efforts to shed the wowserish image of a country where films and television programs are subject to clumsy censorship and Playboy is still taboo.

The authorities recently legalised bar-top dancing, moved to lift a 20-year ban on Cosmopolitan magazine and promised to allow the screening of the titillating television series Sex and the City (with cuts).

But while officials have begun to bend the rules on homosexuality - condoning the employment of gays in the public service despite refusing to legalise their sexual orientation - the ban on oral sex remains.

In a somewhat chauvinist fashion, it is the male recipient of forbidden favour rather than the consensual female administrator of the act who cops the rap. In the wake of the controversy, Government legal officials now claim the girl was only 15 years old at the time of the offence, despite the fact that her age was given as 16 - the age of consent - during the trial.

The court was also told the pair had known each other for more than a year when the offence occurred. "He did not exercise deception or use trickery on the girl," said Abdullah's lawyer, Ismail Hamid, who has lodged an appeal against the sentence's severity.

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