A US court has sentenced a Canadian Ahmadi missionary to 30 years in jail for producing pornography of minor girls for extortion.
Maryland district judge Paula Xinis Monday sentenced Muhammad Luqman Rana, 33, of City of Vaughan (Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya Canada headquarters), to 30 years in federal prison, followed by lifetime supervised release, for producing image and videos depicting the sexual abuse of children and for extortion related to an online “sextortion” scheme.
The US authorities would deport him to Canada after the completion of his sentence. He also paid more than US$20,000 to two of his victims as financial compensation.
According to Rana’s confessional statement, from June 2014 to June 2016, he used a free online chat website to target adult and minor victims living in the United States and Canada to produce sexually explicit images.
Rana tricked five minor US victims, who ranged from ages 12 to 17, into producing sexually explicit images because they believed they were chatting with a male their age. Rana surreptitiously captured two of the minor victims changing in their bedrooms after they had accidentally left their webcam on after chatting with him, said a statement issued by the State Department.
Once Rana had embarrassing and sensitive videos of his victims, he forced them to produce and send additional sexually explicit images and videos via both live transmission and to his email account. They did this out of fear that he would publicly post the videos he had previously obtained if they did not comply with his demands.
Rana’s victims were terrorized by him almost daily for months, and some for over a year, it said.
On a restitution request from two of his five victims, he paid $21,374 to two of his victims. This amount is arranged by the parents of the accused.
Requesting the court for a lesser punishment, Rana’s counsel submitted that Rana has accepted full responsibility for his conduct therefore he entered a guilty plea in this matter.
He said, Rana was a lonely and somewhat isolated child and had very little social interaction spending most of his time in front of a television or computer. The majority of his social interactions and relationships with those outside of his family were experienced on-line through MSN Messenger in his younger days. These interactions were exciting for him, he spent increasingly more time online, and socializing online quickly became his primary source of social contact, the lawyer said.
He did not participate in sports, hobbies, or other endeavors outside of school. He spent most of his free time in his bedroom, on his computer, seeking social connection in the virtual online world.
As Rana got older, he began reaching out to women and girls in the pattern of behavior that forms the basis for his convictions herein. The behaviors became habits and compulsions to connect, converse with, and engage in sexual interactions with girls online.
He felt mounting shame as he indulged in these addictive behaviors. The age of the woman or girl on the other end of the conversation did not matter to him, he said. His addictive behavior was indiscriminate.
The internet and anonymous websites like Omegle provided ample opportunities to interact with women and girls who were also lonely and/or prone to risky on-line behaviors and therefore vulnerable to Rana’s attempts at sexual interaction and control, the lawyer added.
He said, in all other respects, Rana has led a law-abiding, studious, and charitable life. He graduated in 2007 from Maple High School, Maple, Ontario, Canada. He attended and worked at Ahmadiyya Jamaat Canada from 2018 to 2021. He was married, generously charitable making cash donations to many causes within his Jamaat in excess of $20,000 over 5 years between 2017 and 2021 and he was a blood donor, he added.
Rana has been in various forms of detention related to this matter since 2017 when he was first linked to the KingCheetah email account. He was arrested in Canada on January 14, 2021, was held in confinement and then released to home confinement on February 16, 2021, in the custody of his father and later his wife.
He was rearrested again in July 23, 2021 pursuant to the extradition request which eventually brought him before the court. He was extradited on January 25, 2022 and made his initial appearance the next day. He has been in custody since that time.
He has been confined in Lehigh County Jail near Allentown, Pennsylvania since he arrived in the United States. As such he has not had any visitors. Rana’s wife has since decided to divorce him due to the lengthy minimum sentence she knew he will receive and her need to move on with her life, he said.
The accused is a resident of Peace Village, the Canadian headquarters of the Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya. The alleged offenses took place between June 2014 and June 2016, when Rana was in the final year of his seven-year-long Shahid Program to become an Ahmadiyya Missionary at Jamia Ahmadiyya, a Designated Learning Institution in Canada.
The Toronto police arrested Rana on March 24, 2017, after receiving information from the National Child Exploitation Coordination Centre in Ottawa. He was released on bail but later was arrested in January 2022 when another case of this series was reported. He is under detention since then.
