A man linked to the 2005 disappearance in Aruba of Natalee Holloway, an American teenager, will be temporarily extradited to the United States from Peru to face charges of extorting his mother, Peruvian authorities announced on Wednesday.
Ms Holloway disappeared on a trip to the Dutch island with her high school class from Alabama when she was 18. She was pronounced dead in 2012 and the unsolved case has long sparked great public interest in the United States. First there was intense news coverageSO true crime books and feature films.
The suspect, Joran van der Sloot, is a Dutch citizen who grew up in Aruba and has been linked to Ms Holloway’s disappearance for years. According to the FBI, she was last seen leaving an Aruba nightclub in a car with him and two other young men around 1:30 a.m. on May 30, 2005.
Mr. van der Sloot is in Peru serving a 28-year prison sentence for murder in a separate case: the 2010 strangulation death of Stephany Flores, a 21-year-old Peruvian student. He was convicted in 2012, aged 24, after pleading guilty.
At the time of his arrest in 2010 in the Flores case, Mr van der Sloot was charged by a federal grand jury in Alabama for attempting to extort Ms. Holloway’s mother, Beth Holloway, for $250,000 for information about her daughter’s death and the location of her body, which was never found . He accepted an initial payment of $25,000 in an FBI undercover operation and provided what he knew to be false information, authorities said at the time.
The Peruvian Embassy in Washington said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. van der Sloot would be temporarily handed over to the United States for prosecution.
“We hope this action will enable a process that will help bring peace to Ms. Holloway and her family, who are grieving in the same way the Flores family in Peru mourn the loss of their daughter, Stephany,” Peru’s Ambassador in the United States, Gustavo Meza-Cuadra, said in the statement.
A lawyer for Mr. van der Sloot, Maximo Altez, told the Associated Press that he would fight the decision.