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NBC, msnbc.com and news services
updated 2 hours, 9 minutes ago
A young Dutchman previously arrested in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway is the prime suspect in a weekend murder of a Peruvian woman, police said Wednesday.
Joran van der Sloot is being sought in the Sunday killing of 21-year-old Stephany Flores in a Lima hotel, Criminal police chief Gen. Cesar Guardia told a news conference. He said the suspect fled the country the next day by land to Chile.
The Dutch government said Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for Van der Sloot.
Guardia said the 22-year-old Dutchman, who was in the country for a poker tournament, appears with the young woman in a video taken at a Lima casino early Sunday.
The victim's father, Ricardo Flores, told reporters she was killed about 8 a.m. in a hotel room in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood that was splattered with blood, indicating a struggle.
El Comercio newspaper in Lima reported that Flores was stabbed. Her father is a businessman and race car driver.
The killing occurred exactly five years after the May 30, 2005, disappearance of Holloway in Aruba, a Dutch Caribbean island.
"We have an interview with a worker at the hotel who says she saw this foreigner with the victim enter his room," said Guardia.
Van der Sloot left Peru on Monday, Guardia said, according to an immigration registry. He had been staying at the hotel since May 14 and checked out on Sunday four hours after he arrived there with the victim, the police general added.
A document obtained by NBC News from Peru's Dirección General de Migraciones states that Van Der Sloot left Peru on Monday via land to Chile at 1:42 p.m. local time. The document also states he arrived in Peru via Colombia on an Avianca flight on May 14.
Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for Van der Sloot, Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman Bengt van Loosdrecht told The Associated Press in The Netherlands.
He cited as his sources Peruvian police and the Dutch Embassy in Lima. The embassy's head of consular affairs, Angela Lowe, told the AP she could not comment on the case.
An attorney for Van der Sloot in New York City, Joe Tacopina, said he did not know his client's whereabouts and has not been in touch with him since the Peru allegations emerged.
Tacopina cautioned against a rush to judgment.
"Joran van der Sloot has been falsely accused of murder once before. The fact is he wears a bull's-eye on his back now and he is a quote-unquote usual suspect when it comes to allegations of foul play," Tacopina said.
Van der Sloot was twice arrested but later released for lack of evidence in the 2005 disappearance of Holloway, who was on a high school graduation trip to the Caribbean island.
No trace of her has been found and van der Sloot remains the main suspect in the case, said Ann Angela, spokeswoman for the Aruba prosecutor's office.
"What's happening now is incredible," she said. "At this moment we don't have anything to do with it, but we are following the case with great interest and if Peruvian authorities would need us, we are here."
Van der Sloot's late father was a prominent judge in Aruba.
The mystery of Holloway's disappearance has garnered wide attention on television and in newspapers in Europe and the United States.
Holloway, 18, of Mountain Brook, Ala., was last seen in public leaving a bar on Aruba with van der Sloot and two Surinamese brothers — Deepak and Satish Kalpoe — hours before she was due to board a flight home from the school trip.
Two years ago, a Dutch television crime reporter captured hidden-camera footage of Van der Sloot saying he was with Holloway when she collapsed on a beach, drunk. He said he believed she was dead and asked a friend to dump her body in the sea.
Judges subsequently refused to arrest van der Sloot on the basis of the tape.
Chief prosecutor Peter Blanken told NBC News in February that the suspect's story was "very unbelievable," and no charges followed the confession.
"The locations, names and times he gave just did not make sense," Blanken told NBC News.
The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf quoted Blanken as saying that van der Sloot's statement was "held together by lies and fantasy."
The interview was not aired by German broadcaster RTL because of doubts about whether van der Sloot was telling the truth, Blanken added.
Van der Sloot claimed that Holloway had died accidentally and insisted that he did not kill her, Blanken said.
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