California Man Sentenced to 78 Months in Jail for Molesting Child while in the People's Republic of Bangladesh

WASHINGTON, May 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- William Newton Rudd, 67, of Fullerton, Calif., was sentenced today to 78 months in jail after pleading guilty on Oct. 30, 2009, to one count of engaging in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign place, announced Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney André Birotte Jr. for the Central District of California.

U.S. District Court Judge Alicemarie H. Stotler also sentenced Rudd to 10 years of supervised release following his prison term and ordered Rudd to pay $15,000 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 sixteen. 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 traveled to the country of Togo, where he was arrested and escorted back to the United States.

This case 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 U.S. 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. For more information about Project Safe Childhood, please visit www.projectsafechildhood.gov.

The case was prosecuted by Trial Attorney James Silver of CEOS, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Anne Gannon of the Central District of California. The Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement Bureau (ICE), along with the Regional Security Office of the U.S. Embassy in Dhaka, Bangladesh, investigated the case.

SOURCE U.S. Department of Justice