01 November 2023 , 14:16
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A man who confessed to killing high school student Natalee Holloway was returned to Peru on Tuesday to serve the remainder of his prison sentence for another murder.
Joran van der Sloot, a Dutchman, arrived in Lima in the custody of law enforcement. The South American country’s government agreed in June to temporarily extradite him to the US to face trial on extortion and wire fraud charges.
Van der Sloot was long the chief suspect in American high school student Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba in 2005, though authorities in the Dutch Caribbean island never prosecuted him. Then, in an interview with his attorney conducted in the US after his extradition, he admitted to beating the young woman to death on a beach after she refused his advances. He said he dumped her body into the sea.
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The plea deal Van Der Sloot took in his extortion and fraud case required him to take a polygraph (AFP/Getty Images)
Officials in both countries are trying to bring additional charges against Van Der Sloot (Facebook)Van der Sloot, 36, was charged in the US for seeking a quarter of a million dollars to tell Holloway’s family the location of her remains. A plea deal in exchange for a 20-year sentence required him to provide all the information he knew about Holloway’s disappearance, allow her parents to hear in real-time his discussion with law enforcement, and take a polygraph test.
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Video shared on social media by Peru’s National Police shows van der Sloot, hands and feet shackled, walking on the tarmac flanked by two Interpol agents, each grabbing one of his arms. He wore a pink short-sleeved shirt, jeans, tennis shoes and a bulletproof vest that identified him as an Interpol detainee.
Video showed van der Sloot filling out paperwork after being handed over to Peruvian authorities (Policia Nacional del Peru/AFP vi)The video also showed him doing paperwork at the airport, where he also underwent a health exam. Col. Aldo Avila, head of Interpol in Peru, said van der Sloot would be taken to a prison in the northern Lima, the capital. About two hours after van der Sloot's arrival, three police patrol cars and three police motorcycles left the airport escorting a black vehicle with tinted windows.
His sentence for extortion will run concurrently with prison time he is serving for murder in Peru, where he pleaded guilty in 2012 to killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores, a business student from a prominent Peruvian family. She was killed in 2010 five years to the day after Holloway’s disappearance.
Dutchman Joran Van Der Sloot (2-L) being handed over to local authorities in Callao, upon returning to Peru on October 31 (Policia Nacional del Peru/AFP vi)Van der Sloot has been transferred among Peruvian prisons while serving his 28-year sentence in response to reports that he enjoyed privileges such as television, internet access and a cellphone and accusations that he threatened to kill a warden. Before he was extradited to the US, he was housed in a prison in a remote area of the Andes, called Challapalca, at 4,600 meters (about 15,090 feet) above sea level.
Holloway went missing during a high school graduation trip. She was last seen May 30, 2005, leaving a bar with van der Sloot. A judge eventually declared her dead, but her body was never found.
Joran Van Der Sloot admitted to bashing Natalee Holloway's head in with a cinderblock (Facebook)The Holloway family has long sought answers about her disappearance, and van der Sloot has given shifting accounts over the years. At one point, he said Holloway was buried in gravel under the foundation of a house but later admitted that was untrue.
Five years after the killing, an FBI sting recorded the extortion attempt in which van der Sloot asked Beth Holloway to pay him $250,000 so he would tell her where to find her daughter’s body. He agreed to accept $25,000 to disclose the location and asked for the other $225,000 once the remains were recovered.
Before he could be arrested in the extortion case, van der Sloot slipped away by moving from Aruba to Peru. After his recent confession to killing Holloway became public, prosecutors in Aruba asked the U.S. Justice Department for documents to determine if any measures will be taken against van der Sloot.