A South Korean anti-prostitution activist, who fled to the United States in 2019 after being sought on charges of extortion, has been repatriated home, prosecutors said Friday.

The Supreme Prosecutors Office (SPO) said the 40-year-old fugitive, whose name was withheld, was captured in the US in December and was returned to South Korea on Thursday in the form of forced deportation.

He was put on a wanted list for extorting money from prostitution establishments in collusion with gangsters while working as a deputy head of a civic group that calls itself a "female and youth prostitution eradication group."

The head of the civic group, which was established in April 2016 and registered as a nonprofit private organization in Gyeonggi Province in November 2018, was already convicted of extortion and sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison in 2020.

A local court also confirmed an imprisonment of 2 1/2 years for the group's fugitive deputy head on the same charges in February last year.

The two are accused of seizing control of prostitution and adult entertainment establishments in Gyeonggi, which surrounds Seoul, with the help of organized crime rings. They are also suspected of using violence and committing various illegalities to extort profits from owners of those establishments.

The SPO said it had closely cooperated with the Homeland Security Investigations, an investigative arm of the US Department of Homeland Security, after confirming that the fugitive was staying in the US illegally. He was arrested in Virginia in December, it noted. (Yonhap)