The National Police detains in Madrid one of the 10 most wanted fugitives by the FBI

The National Police have arrested Michael J. Pratt, one of the criminals included in the

(Top 10 FBI Most Wanted Fugitives).

Pratt had been sentenced to life imprisonment in the United States for crimes of child pornography, sexual exploitation and assault, and illicit gains of more than 16 million euros.

It is the first time that a criminal included in this list has been located in Spain.

Most of these fugitives are usually in the United States, only 57 have been captured in other countries.

Between 2012 and 2019, Michael James Pratt, a 40-year-old New Zealander, deceived minors and very young women —from different cities in the United States and Canada— to produce audiovisual pornographic material.

To capture them, the detainee published advertisements on the Internet offering alleged modeling jobs, which in the end turned out to be pornographic recordings.

Pratt used other women as bait, paying them to convince the victims that the material would never be published, the National Police reported this Friday in a press release.

Sometimes these women were held against their will at the recording locations and were not allowed to leave them until the production finished.

According to testimonies from the victims themselves, in the worst case they were forced to engage in sexual practices that they had previously expressly refused.

All the content ended up on pornographic-themed web pages, generating profits of more than 17 million dollars (more than 16 million euros).

Pratt fled when he learned that he had been sentenced to life imprisonment at the end of 2019. The US authorities issued an international arrest warrant and the FBI itself included him among the so-called 10 Most Wanted Fugitives.

The National Police began an investigation a year ago indicating that Pratt was in Barcelona, ​​although after numerous checks no results were obtained.

In parallel, the authorities of the North American country allocated significant resources to the case, carrying out advertising campaigns aimed at gathering any information that would facilitate the arrest of the fugitive, even offering a reward of $100,000 (about 94,000 euros) in exchange for any relevant clue. .

Several private investigators went to Spain, but their investigations in Barcelona were unsuccessful.

Finally, after a year of exhaustive searches throughout Spain, on Wednesday, December 21, Pratt was located in a central Madrid hotel, where he was staying under one of the many false identities he used to try to go unnoticed.

The National Police have detained him in collaboration with the FBI, among other agencies.

Pratt has been the second of the FBI's 10 most wanted fugitives captured this year in the world.

The first was Rafael Caro Quintero, known as El Narco de Narcos in the 1980s, who was arrested on July 15 in Mexico.

Caro Quintero had already been in prison in 1985 for the brutal murder of an infiltrated agent of the DEA (the United States anti-drug agency), Kiki Camarena, and in 2013 he was released in Mexico after a scandalous judicial decision, when he still lacked for serving 12 years in prison.

The remaining eight fugitives are Bhadreshkumar Chetanbhai Patel (an Indian man wanted for allegedly killing his wife), Alejandro Rosales Castillo (a US citizen wanted for the murder of a co-worker), Ruja Plamenova Ignatova (Bulgarian-German con artist), Arnoldo Jiménez (another American wanted for the May 2012 murder of his wife), Omar Alexander Cardenas (for murder and illegal escape), Alexis Flores (a Honduran fugitive wanted for the kidnapping and murder of a five-year-old girl), José Rodolfo Villarreal-Hernández (a Mexican man wanted for murder) and Yulan Adonay Archaga Carias (another Honduran wanted for extortion, drug trafficking and firearms crimes).