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A 39-year-old American man wanted for allegedly travelling to Tanzania to have sex with a 14-year-old girl and possession of child abuse material has been extradited from Columbia and appeared in a federal court in Los Angeles, California on Monday.
Ivan Lozano Hernandez, a former resident of Long Beach, California, was charged in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury with four counts: enticement of a minor to engage in criminal sexual activity; travel with intent to engage in illicit sexual conduct; engaging in illicit sexual conduct in a foreign place; and possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
The Los Angeles field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) disclosed this in a Facebook post on Monday.
Lozano was remanded to federal custody after his initial appearance in court.
According to a Long Beach Post report from 2023, criminal charges were first announced against the defendant, also identified as Ivan Lozano, in March 2023.
The US Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles said the charges against him come as part of eight child sexual exploitation cases involving nine defendants over the course of nearly two years, the report stated.
The Tanzanian girl was reportedly 14 at the time of her alleged exploitation by Lozano, who encouraged her to send him multiple videos and photos of her of a “sexual nature”.
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A criminal complaint filed in federal court in March 2023 stated that Lozano began speaking with the teenager in December 2019 after commenting on one of her social media posts.
Their conversations initially involved talking about daily activities and the teen’s interests, according to the complaint.
However, the following year, Lozano allegedly initiated a change in his relationship with the girl and began asking her for nude photos and videos.
The US Attorney’s Office said, “In October 2021, according to the complaint affidavit, Lozano traveled to Tanzania for the purpose of having sex with the girl, which he recorded on video.”
The girl’s parents discovered her relationship with Lozano and cut off their communication, according to the criminal complaint.
On July 21, 2022, federal agents who executed a search warrant on his residence in Long Beach, which he shared with his mother, allegedly found found five items considered evidence, including an iPhone containing explicit pictures of the teenage girl, in addition to more than 2,000 other videos depicting child sexual abuse.
