Filipino celebrity preacher Apollo Quiboloy, accused in his home country of orchestrating a sex and labor trafficking scheme and wanted by the FBI, was captured following a massive two-week manhunt, officials in the Philippines said Sunday.

       “Pastor Quiboloy has been caught!” Interior Secretary Benhur Abalos wrote on Facebook, along with a selfie with the accused pastor.

       Late last month, the Philippine National Police launched a search for the pastor, dispatching thousands of law enforcement officials to raid a sprawling, 75-acre compound in the southern Philippines belonging to the Kingdom of Jesus Christ (KOJC), a religious group founded by Quiboloy. On Sunday, police spokesperson Jean Fajardo told reporters he was captured inside the compound.

       The megachurch founder and four others are subjects of an arrest warrant on “serious charges, including child abuse, sex trafficking, and sexual abuse of minors,” Philippine police said. Fajardo said Sunday that “a negotiation took place” for the surrender of Quiboloy and the other four after police gave them “a 24-hour ultimatum.”

       Quiboloy — who refers to himself as “owner of the universe” and “the appointed son of God” — is also wanted by the FBI in a separate investigation. The pastor, who the FBI says is either 74 or 77 years old, was indicted in 2021 by a federal grand jury in California on charges including conspiracy, sex trafficking of children, and sex trafficking by force, fraud and coercion. A federal warrant was issued for his arrest in November 2021.

       Quiboloy founded the Kingdom of Jesus Christ in 1985 in Davao City, Philippines, according to U.S. court records. The church has claimed to have about 6 million members in countries around the world.

       In Quiboloy’s U.S. case, prosecutors accused him and his accomplices of recruiting women and girls as young as 12 to work as Quiboloy’s assistants, or “pastorals,” in an alleged sex trafficking operation that lasted from 2002 to 2018.

       For over 15 years, the victims were forced to devote their lives and bodies to Quiboloy, including by regularly engaging in sexual acts with him in what he called the “night duty,” according to U.S. prosecutors. Quiboloy and his accomplices would threaten his victims and tell them that obedience to Quiboloy was “God’s will” and that “night duty” was considered a privilege and a means to salvation, court records state.

       The Kingdom of Jesus Christ church did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

       Quiboloy and his lawyer have denied the allegations against him in the Philippines and claimed they were fabricated by critics and disgruntled former members of the church, the Associated Press reported. In 2021, an attorney representing Quiboloy denied both countries’ allegations against the pastor and said the 42-count superseding indictment from a federal grand jury in California was based on false testimony from former church members.

       The U.S. indictment expanded on charges filed in 2020 against three church administrators. Prosecutors accused them of illegally bringing church members to the United States on fraudulent visas and forcing them to solicit money for a bogus charity that financed the megachurch’s operations and its leaders’ lavish lifestyles.

       Federal investigators said some members who successfully solicited money for the church were forced into sham marriages. Leaders allegedly arranged fraudulent student visas for others so they could continue collecting money for the church, prosecutors said.

       After the raid began on Aug. 24 at the Davao City compound, supporters of Quiboloy descended, heckling police and denouncing efforts to arrest him. A statement on the group’s website called the police operation an “illegal siege.” Several police and riot officers were injured in an assault by a church member who attacked them with stones and a 12-inch kitchen knife, a regional police office said.

       The raid was launched after police tried for almost two months to get Quiboloy to surrender into their custody, the Philippine National Police said on Aug. 25.

       The embattled pastor had a close relationship with the former leader of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, that critics said afforded him a measure of protection at home. Duterte, who left office in 2022 and is known for leading a bloody war on drugs that killed thousands of people, once said that Quiboloy had gifted him a house, in which he planned to retire.

       During the raid, Duterte said members of KOJC had become “victims of political harassment, persecution, violence, and abuse of authority,” local media reported.

       Duterte’s daughter, Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte, called the raid a “gross abuse of police power” in an Aug. 25 statement and asked members of KOJC to “forgive” her.

       A police statement said the official who led the raid, police Brig. Gen. Nicolas Torre III, was “committed to implementing the law without fear or favor.”

       The Philippine Justice Department also said officers rescued two apparent trafficking victims from the compound during their raid, identified by police as a woman and a 20-year-old man. It said officers were responding to distress calls from the man’s mother, who said her son left home in 2022 with a KOJC member who promised him a scholarship, but who instead brought him to Davao City, where he was “not allowed to freely communicate with his parents or go home.”

       The Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development, which assisted police in the operation, said in a statement that the allegations against Quiboloy “strike at the very core of what we stand for: protecting those who cannot protect themselves.”

       Andrea Salcedo and Regine Cabato contributed to this report.