25 May,2010 08:48 AM IST | | IANS
A US court has sentenced a California-man, in late 60s, to 78 months in jail for molesting a child in Bangladesh.
The US court further sentenced 67-year-old William Newton Rudd to 10 years of supervised release following his prison term and ordered him to pay USD15,000 in restitution to the victims.
According to the plea agreement, while working in Bangladesh for a USAID-funded development program, Rudd engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with a boy under the age of 16; said the Justice Department.
According to court documents, an investigation of Rudd turned up reports of abuse of additional victims.
After a search warrant was executed at Rudd's Bangladesh hotel room in 2004, Rudd travelled to the country of Togo, where he was arrested and escorted back to the US.
Thecase was brought as part of Project Safe Childhood, a nationwide initiative to combat the growing epidemic of child sexual exploitation and abuse launched in May 2006 by the Department of Justice.
Led by US Attorneys' Offices and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), Project Safe Childhood marshals federal, state and local resources to better locate, apprehend and prosecute individuals who exploit children via the Internet, as well as to identify and rescue victims.u00a0
