Joran van der Sloot is on his way to the United States after the extradition process began Friday night in Peru.
The Dutch citizen is considered the prime suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway. He will answer charges of having tried to extort money from Holloway’s family following his disappearance.
Earlier this week, van der Sloot’s lawyer confirmed that his client had been badly beaten in the Peruvian prison he has been in since he was convicted of murdering 21-year-old student Stephany Flores in 2010 .
Peruvian lawyer Maximo Altez said he did not believe his client’s beating was related to the upcoming extradition. The details and extent of van der Sloot’s injuries are not yet known.
More likely, he said, it could be related to gang rules in Challapalca prison, where van der Sloot is being held.
Van der Sloot, a Dutch citizen, is serving a 28-year sentence in Peru for the 2010 murder of 21-year-old student Stephany Flores. He was recently beaten by fellow prisoners, according to his lawyer
Natalee Holloway, 18, disappeared in 2005. The teenager was on a graduation trip to Aruba with her high school classmates from Alabama.
The prisoner has since been moved to the facility’s medical aisle and his lawyer has requested that he be moved to another prison as soon as possible.
Natalee Holloway disappeared in 2005 when she was just 18. The teenager was on a graduation trip to Aruba with her high school classmates from Alabama.
She was last seen leaving with a group of young men, including van der Sloot, who was 17 at the time.
Van der Sloot, 35, maintains he did not murder Natalee, who was 18 when she disappeared after leaving a nightclub with him and two of his friends on the Caribbean island of Aruba in 2005.
Her body was never found and she was declared legally dead in 2012 at the request of her father, Dave Holloway.
Van der Sloot was arrested as a suspect but eventually released. He was later indicted by a federal jury in Alabama in 2010 for allegedly trying to extort the Holloway family – the charges he is now being extradited on.
Prosecutors alleged that in March 2010, van der Sloot contacted Beth Holloway – Natalee’s mother – and said he would reveal the location of the teenager’s body for $250,000, of which $25,000 would be paid in advance.
During an undercover operation, Holloway’s attorney, John Kelly, met the suspect at an Aruba hotel and gave him $10,000 in cash, while Holloway wired an additional $15,000 on the van der Sloot’s bank account.
Van der Sloot, then in his early twenties, allegedly changed his story to the night he was with Natalee Holloway.
The convicted murderer is currently awaiting extradition to the United States from the maximum security Challapalca prison
Van der Sloot, who Natalee had been with the night she disappeared, was held as a suspect in the case but eventually released
In 2012, van der Sloot pleaded guilty to the murder of a young Peruvian woman in 2010
Beth Holloway, mother of Natalee Holloway, speaks during the opening of the Natalee Holloway Resource Center (NHRC) at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, June 8, 2010
He claimed, according to prosecutors, that he picked her up, but when she demanded to be shot, he threw her to the ground and her head hit a rock and she was killed instantly.
Van der Sloot then allegedly took Kelly to a house and said that her father, who has since died, had buried Holloway’s body in the foundation of the building.
Kelly then informed van der Sloot that the information he had provided was “worthless” and within days the suspect had left Aruba for Peru.
Earlier this month, Peruvian authorities issued an executive order accepting a temporary extradition request from US authorities. No date has yet been set for the extradition.
Earlier this month it was also revealed that van der Sloot is currently in the process of divorcing his wife, mother of his daughter, over a ‘prettier and younger’ girlfriend who is accused of making him look drugs in prison.
Van der Sloot married accountant Leidy Figueroa, 33, in a private ceremony at Piedras Gordas prison in July 2014, when Leidy was seven months pregnant with their daughter.
Just months after tying the knot, she gave a gushing interview to DailyMail.com claiming her new husband was ‘sweet, sensitive, kind’ and ‘no freak’.
The pair met while Leidy was selling candy and cigarettes to inmates at another of van der Sloot’s former prisons – Miguel Castro Castro, in Lima.
The prison’s lax rules meant that Leidy began visiting her twice a week and the couple exchanged a flood of sugary love letters.
They even named their daughter Dusha Trudie van der Sloot, 8, after the killer’s grandmother, Trudie.
But their unlikely romance began to unravel in 2020 after van der Sloot was charged with smuggling drugs into prison with girlfriend Eva Pacohuanaco, Altez said.
van der Sloot abandons his wife, Leidy Figueroa, 33 (pictured left in 2014 shortly after they married), as he is now in a relationship with Eva Pacohuanaco (right), who is accused of smuggling drugs into her jail in peru
Despite his infidelity, it was van der Sloot who filed for divorce about a year ago because he was now in a relationship with “prettier and younger” Pacohuanaco, 24, according to Altez.
The killer now has fewer female visitors due to tighter security at his current prison, Challapalca, in Puno, Peru, but he “still writes to the girls and they send him pictures”, his lawyer said.
Pacohuanaco is accused of helping van der Sloot smuggle nearly 300 grams of cocaine and 140 grams of marijuana to another prison in Juliaca, according to reports in Peru.
This earned the Dutchman an additional seven years on his sentence for Flores’ murder.
How long it will take for van der Sloot to be extradited will depend on a number of factors, including arranging transportation to airlift him to the United States and an agreement from the United States that he will be returned to the United States. Peru to serve his sentence there.
After a trial in the United States, van der Sloot would be sent back to Peru to complete his sentence for the murder of Flores and a separate charge of drug trafficking in prison.
