The main suspect in the 2005 disappearance of US teenager Natalee Holloway has been extradited to the US to stand trial for alleged extortion.
Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, 35, is accused of taking tens of thousands of dollars from Natalee Holloway’s mother in exchange for revealing the location of their daughter’s body.
Prosecutors say he gave her false information and fled to Peru.
In Peru, he murdered a young Peruvian woman and was sentenced to 28 years.
Footage released by Peruvian police on Thursday showed van der Sloot being transferred from the jail where he has served half of his murder sentence to an air force base in the capital, Lima.
There, he was handed over to FBI agents, who flew with him on a US Department of Justice plane to Birmingham, Alabama.
Van der Sloot arrived in the US around 14:30 local time (19:30 GMT).
The disappearance of Natalee Holloway during a school trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba was widely covered in US and international media.
The 18-year-old was last seen leaving a nightclub and getting into a car with Dutch national Joran van der Sloot, who was 17 at the time, and two young brothers from Suriname, Deepak and Saltish Kalpoe.
Van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers were arrested shortly after Natalee Holloway’s disappearance, but were released again because of a lack of evidence.
Natalee Holloway’s body was never found.
But prosecutors allege that in 2010, van der Sloot said he would reveal the location of Natalee Holloway’s body if her mother paid him $25,000 (£20,000) up front and another $225,000 once the remains were identified.
Once he had been paid the initial $25,000, he gave Ms Holloway’s lawyer a location where he said her daughter’s remains were hidden and then absconded to Peru.
Nothing was found at the location he had given.
Five years to the day after Natalee Holloway’s disappearance, Joran van der Sloot took a 21-year-old Peruvian student, Stephany Flores, back to his hotel room after meeting her at a casino in Lima.
Ms Flores was found dead in the room the next morning.
Police tracked van der Sloot down to neighbouring Chile, where he had fled.
He was extradited to Peru, where he told police that he killed Stephany Flores when she had become aware of his connection to the Natalee Holloway disappearance.
He confessed to beating, strangling and suffocating the young Peruvian.
In 2010, Van der Sloot was sentenced to 28 years for Flores’s murder, but Peruvian authorities agreed to extradite him to the US “temporarily” so he can face extortion and wire fraud charges there.
The head of Interpol in the Peruvian capital said that “this transfer will be temporary while the process in the United States lasts. Later, the Dutch citizen will be returned to Peru, so that he can continue to serve his sentence in the Challapalca prison”.
While Natalee Holloway’s body is still missing, a judge in Alabama declared her legally dead in 2012.
Source: bbc.co.uk
Be the first to comment