Spanish police announced on Friday that they had arrested a New Zealander in Madrid who had been sentenced to life in prison in the US for sex trafficking and child crime.
He was one of the FBI’s ten most wanted fugitives. A New Zealander sentenced to life in prison in the US was arrested on Friday in Madrid, Spain, at a hotel where he was staying under one of the false identities. An offer of $100,000 had been made to anyone who could locate the 40-year-old, who has been the subject of an international arrest warrant since 2019.
According to the Spanish police, his presence in the country has long been suspected. US investigators had even been on site some time earlier, but “their search,” carried out “in Barcelona,” was “unsuccessful,” according to a press release.
$17 million through his criminal enterprise
The arrested man’s name is Michael James Pratt, according to a source familiar with the matter. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for “child pornography”, “sexual exploitation”, “sexual coercion” and “illegal enrichment”. On its website, the FBI states that between 2012 and 2019, this New Zealander recruited several young adult and underage women in the United States and Canada for forced sexual acts through classified ads for work as a model.
As the owner of a production company and pornographic websites, he would then have published the videos of these young women. He would have accumulated more than $17 million thanks to those actions, according to authorities. Michael James Pratt, who was also accused of sexually assaulting several young women, had escaped after serving his life sentence.