TORONTO: An Ahmadi missionary, Muhammad Luqman Rana, in Canada was arrested on charges producing child pornography and threatening the victims with injuring their reputation for personal gains.
The 32-year-old missionary is facing at least 10 charges of producing pornography of five children and extorting them by threatening to injure their reputation in the United States. If convicted on all counts, he faces a mandatory term of 15 to 160 years in federal prison.
According to the US Department of Justice, Luqman Rana persuaded, induced and coerced five minor victims, residing in Maryland, Oklahoma, Wisconsin, Washington, and New York to “engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing child pornography and extorted the victims by threatening to injure their reputation.”
The accused is a resident of Peace Village, the Canada headquarters of the Jamaat-e-Ahmadiyya. Department of Justice officials say the incidents took place between June 2014 and June 2016, when he was in the final year of his seven-year-long missionary course at Jamia Ahmadiyya, Canada.
The Justice Department’s office of international affairs worked with Canada’s law enforcement agencies to secure Rana’s arrest in Canada and his extradition to the United States. The investigation is being conducted jointly by the FBI and Toronto Police Services.
According to page 9-10 of the June–July 2015 issue of Jamia Ahmadiyya Canada’s newsletter The Western Horizon, Rana graduated as a missionary in 2015 with six other students.
“The court documents in the case were sealed until January 26, 2022, when Rana made his initial appurtenance in the US District Court in Baltimore before Magistrate Judge A. David Copperthite”, the Justice Department said in a statement.
In presence of the accused before the court, an assistant attorney of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, the US Attorney for the District of Maryland, a special agent in charge of the FBI, and the chief of Toronto Police Service announced the charges.
Reportedly, Canadian police had arrested Rana on March 24, 2017, for extorting a teenage girl into sending him sexual photos and videos of herself. The police had arrested him after receiving information from the National Child Exploitation Co-ordination Centre in Ottawa.
According to Ahmadi sources, after his arrest in 2017, Rana was ousted from the Jamaat but was later restored and given an assignment at a Mississauga place of worship.
Jamia Ahmadiyya Canada prepares Ahmadi missionaries like other Ahmadi seminaries in Pakistan, India, England, Ghana, Germany, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. Other than small courses, they offer a main seven-year program known as Shahid (The Witness).
