Natalee Holloway case suspect Joran van der Sloot to be transferred to US custody Thursday, Peruvian officials say
By Jimena de la Quintana, CNN
(CNN) — Joran van der Sloot, the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway, will be temporarily transferred to US custody on June 8 to face extortion and fraud charges, Peruvian authorities told CNN.
Javier Llaque Moya, the president of Peru’s National Penitentiary Institute, said, “It has already been agreed that the US authority will come on the 8th to take him.”
Van der Sloot was moved from a maximum security prison in southern Peru on Saturday to a prison in the capital, Lima, according to officials with knowledge of the facts who spoke to CNN en Español journalists.
He is expected to remain detained at Ancón 1 prison in Lima until his transfer to the US. Moya said the penitentiary institute will hand van der Sloot over to Interpol, who will pick him up from the prison.
“Everything is ready for him to be handed over, we have him safe, which is what the US authority requested, that he would be in good health,” Moya added. “That is how we will keep him until the 8th, we guarantee that.”
Van der Sloot is set to stand trial in the US on extortion and fraud charges related to an alleged plot to extort Holloway’s family after her disappearance, Peruvian officials have said. How long the transfer process would take is not yet known, officials told CNN en Español journalists.
Maximo Altez, van der Sloot’s attorney, received a letter from van der Sloot last week asking him not to appeal his transfer to the US. “I want to go to the US,” van der Sloot wrote, Altez told CNN en Español Tuesday.
Van der Sloot was involved in a fight inside his prison ward during visiting hours last week and suffered a cut to his fingers and some bruising, Altez said, adding that van der Sloot was placed in the prison’s medical section.
Van der Sloot, a Dutch national, was convicted in 2012 of murdering Stephany Flores, 21, in his Lima hotel room and sentenced to 28 years in prison.
He faces charges in connection with an alleged plot to sell false information about the whereabouts of 18-year-old Holloway’s remains in exchange for $250,000. Holloway’s mother, Beth Holloway, wired $15,000 to a bank account van der Sloot held in the Netherlands and through her attorney gave him another $10,000 in person, according to a 2010 US federal indictment.
Once he had the initial $25,000, van der Sloot said he would show John Kelly, the Holloway family attorney, where Natalee Holloway’s remains were hidden, but the information turned out to be false, the indictment states.
Natalee Holloway was last seen alive with van der Sloot and two other men 18 years ago leaving a nightclub in Aruba.
Police in Aruba arrested and released the three men – van der Sloot and brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe – multiple times in 2005 and 2007 in connection with Holloway’s disappearance. Attorneys for the men maintained the men’s innocence throughout the investigation.
In December 2007, the Aruban Public Prosecutor’s Office said none of the three would be charged and dropped the cases against them, citing insufficient evidence.
Holloway’s body has not been found. An Alabama judge signed an order in 2012 declaring her legally dead. No one is currently charged in her death.
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CNN en Español’s Juan Carlos Paz contributed to this report.
