LIMA, Peru – Joran van der Sloot confessed to the slaying of a 21-year-old woman in a Lima hotel room, a high-ranking Peruvian government official told NBC News on Monday.
According to La Republica newspaper, van der Sloot said he broke Stephany Flores’ neck after she grabbed his laptop without his permission and found out that he was involved in the disappearance of an American woman.
The paper quoted van der Sloot as saying, “I did not want to do it. The girl intruded into my private life… she didn’t have any right.
“I went to her and I hit her. She was scared, we argued and she tried to escape. I grabbed her by the neck and hit her.”
NBC News reported that a lawmaker confirmed that van der Sloot confessed to a police officer during interrogation. However, the source did not know the circumstances under which the confession was allegedly obtained.
The Dutchman, who is also the prime suspect in U.S. teen Natalee Holloway’s 2005 disappearance in Aruba, is being held in a seventh-floor cell with a bunk bed and blanket and gets three hot meals a day, said Maj. Jose Gamboa, spokesman for the Peruvian national police.
On Tuesday, police planned to take van der Sloot back to the hotel where Flores’ body was found to participate in a reconstruction of the events leading to her slaying, Col. Abel Gamarra, head of the Information Directorate of Police, told The Associated Press.
Members of van der Sloot’s family, including his mother, were planning to travel to Lima on Tuesday, a lawmaker told NBC News.
Poker
Van der Sloot is suspected in the May 30 killing — five years to the day after Holloway’s disappearance — of Flores, a business student who police say he met playing poker at a casino.
On Saturday, police released video taken by security cameras at the hotel where van der Sloot had been staying since arriving from Colombia on May 14. It shows the two entering van der Sloot’s room together and the Dutchman leaving alone four hours later.
The woman’s battered body was found on the hotel room’s floor more than two days later, her neck broken. Van der Sloot had by then crossed into Chile, where he was arrested Thursday.
In video taken of the husky 22-year-old Dutchman that was broadcast Sunday by a TV channel, Peruvian police search van der Sloot’s belongings in his presence.
They pull out of his backpack a laptop, a business-card holder and 15 bills in foreign currency. Van der Sloot tells police the money includes Thai, Cambodian and Bolivian currency. He is asked for credit cards and documents and appears to say — his Spanish is very rudimentary — that they are in a hotel room back in Chile.
Earlier denial
Earlier, Peru’s chief homicide investigator, Col. Miguel Canlla, would neither confirm nor deny a Sunday report in the Lima newspaper El Comercio that van der Sloot told his Peruvian questioners he was innocent of the Flores killing.
“I don’t know where that information came from,” Canlla told The Associated Press. “We are still in the investigative stage.”
Chilean police had said that van der Sloot declared himself innocent in the Lima slaying but acknowledged having met Flores.
Van der Sloot was represented by a state-appointed lawyer during Saturday’s questioning.
Until he hires his own counsel, “the guys prosecuting him will decide which attorney he’s going to get,” van der Sloot’s U.S. attorney, Joseph Tacopina, told the AP.
Tacopina said the suspect’s family “is trying to find competent counsel.
She said Peruvian authorities have assured the Dutch government they are treating him well. “They are taking this case very seriously,” she added. “The world is watching.”
The suspect spoke to his mother by telephone for the first time Saturday, Lowe said.
Van der Sloot’s father, a former judge and attorney on the Dutch Caribbean island of Aruba, died in February. The suspect has two brothers.
After a 17-hour journey up the Pan-American Highway from Chile in a police caravan Saturday, the young Dutchman was paraded, sheathed in bulletproof vest and handcuffed, before reporters at criminal police headquarters in Lima.
He was then submitted to an initial interrogation. A judge subsequently granted prosecutors’ request to extend van der Sloot’s preliminary detention order seven more days, said Gamboa, the national police spokesman.
If tried and convicted of murder, van der Sloot faces a potential prison term of 35 years.
He remains, meanwhile, the prime suspect in the disappearance in Aruba of Holloway, an Alabama teen who hasn’t been seen since May 30, 2005. He was arrested and released in that case, and faces no charges.
Extortion charge
Van der Sloot was charged Thursday in the United States with trying to extort $250,000 from Holloway’s family in exchange for disclosing the location of her body and describing how she died.
U.S. prosecutors say $15,000 was transferred to a Dutch bank account in his name. In the Netherlands on Friday, prosecutors raided two homes in the case, seizing computers, cell phones and data-storage devices.
Peruvian President Alan Garcia told reporters Friday that van der Sloot would have to be tried in Flores’ death before any extradition request could be considered.
Holloway, 18, was 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 her.
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.
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.
