Dutch murder suspect back in Peru to face charges

[June 05, 2010]  LIMA, Peru (AP) -- A Dutch suspect in the 2005 disappearance of an Alabama teenager in Aruba and the recent murder of a 21-year-old woman in a Lima hotel was en route to Peru's capital, where a preliminary warrant for his arrest was issued.

Wearing a bulletproof vest, Joran van der Sloot was taken away by Peruvian police Friday after being deported from neighboring Chile, where he was arrested the day before in a taxi headed from Santiago toward the Vina del Mar resort.

Peru's chief Cabinet minister, Javier Velasquez, told Radioprogramas radio that van der Sloot would arrive in the capital, Lima, on Saturday morning.

Van der Sloot told police in Chile that he did not kill Stephany Flores, who was found dead in his hotel room with her neck broken earlier this week. Chilean police spokesman Ricardo Flores said van der Sloot acknowledged, however, that "he met her and at some point they went to a casino."

The girl's father, Ricardo Flores, told The Associated Press that video cameras tracked the couple as they walked before dawn Sunday to van der Sloot's hotel from the casino in Lima's upscale Miraflores district where they met playing poker.

Flores said he doesn't want the death penalty for van der Sloot, only justice. In Peru, murder carries a prison sentence of up to 35 years.

"I haven't slept since Monday," Flores, his eyelids heavy and speech slurred, said in an interview at his Lima home. "I'm waiting for him to step foot on Peruvian soil." Then, he said, he'd take a sleeping pill or simply collapse from exhaustion.

Flores, a circus promoter and former race car driver, spoke as the 22-year-old Dutchman was being flown handcuffed to the border with Peru.

Van der Sloot remains the prime suspect in the May, 30, 2005 disappearance - five years to the day of Flores' murder - of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway on the Dutch island of Aruba.

The longtime fixture of TV true-crime shows also now faces criminal charges in the United States of trying to extort $250,000 from Holloway's family in exchange for disclosing the location of Holloway's body and describing how she died. U.S. prosecutors charged van der Sloot with the crime on Thursday, saying $15,000 had been transferred to a Dutch bank account in his name. In the Netherlands on Friday, prosecutors acting on a U.S. request raided two homes seeking evidence in the case, seizing computers, cell phones and data-storage devices.

The body of Stephany Flores, a business student with a sunny disposition, was found late Tuesday in the Lima hotel room where van der Sloot had been staying since arriving in Peru on May 14 from Colombia.

She was fully clothed, with multiple bruises and scratches on her body but no signs she had been sexually assaulted, the chief of Peru's criminal police, Gen. Cesar Guardia, told the AP.

A tennis racket was found in the room "that could have been the murder weapon but that's so far not been proven," said Dr. Cesar Tejada, deputy Lima medical examiner.

"My daughter resisted," Flores told the AP in a marble-floored interior porch of his home. "There was violence, resistance to being raped - and there's where she was murdered."

Flores said police wouldn't let him see his daughter's battered body. His oldest son, 35, identified her at the morgue, and the casket was closed at her funeral.

Peruvian police say they have video of van der Sloot and Flores together in the casino and on the street and say witnesses saw the two enter the Dutchman's hotel room about 5 a.m. and van der Sloot leaving alone some four hours later.

Flores, 48, buried his daughter Thursday but said he expected her to be exhumed for DNA testing.

"Under the fingernails of my daughter there are traces, evidence, that's why they didn't permit her cremation," he said.

Dr. Tejada confirmed that valuable evidence could be found under the girl's fingernails.

Flores said he hopes his daughter's death will help investigators solve not just the Holloway case but others of missing girls in which van der Sloot might be responsible.

Holloway was an 18-year-old celebrating her high school graduation on Aruba when she disappeared. Van der Sloot told investigators he left her on a beach, drunk. That's the last anyone saw of her. Van der Sloot was twice arrested in her disappearance - and twice released for insufficient evidence.

Two years ago, a Dutch television crime reporter captured hidden-camera footage of van der Sloot saying that after Holloway collapsed on the beach he asked a friend to dump her body in the sea. But judges in Aruba ruled it insufficient to re-arrest him. The same journalist, Peter de Vries, reported later in 2008 that van der Sloot was recruiting Thai women in Bangkok for sex work in the Netherlands.

A person answering the phone Friday at the home of the girl's mother, Beth Holloway of Mountain Brook, Alabama, said she was not there and hung up. The girl's uncle, Paul Reynolds, told NBC's "Today" show that the family hopes to see van der Sloot behind bars and the Aruba case reopened. He called the alleged extortion attempt "despicable."

A New York lawyer for van der Sloot, Joseph Tacopina, had no immediate comment on his client's predicament. He said he was not yet able to say whether a Peruvian lawyer had been obtained for the young man.

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Associated Press writers Eva Vergara in Santiago, Chile, Carla Salazar in Lima, Karel Navarro in Tacna, Peru, and Michael Melia in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report.

[Associated Press; By FRANK BAJAK and FRANKLIN BRICENO]

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