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http://www.mercurynews.com/nation-world/ci_15232931?nclick_check=1

Dutch murder suspect back in Peru to face charges

By FRANK BAJAK and FRANKLIN BRICENO Associated Press Writers
Posted: 06/04/2010 11:29:42 PM PDT
Updated: 06/04/2010 11:37:46 PM PDT

LIMA, Peru—

*excerpt*

Van der Sloot told police in Chile that he did not kill Stephany Flores, who was found dead in his hotel room with her neck broken earlier this week. Chilean police spokesman Ricardo Flores said van der Sloot acknowledged, however, that “he met her and at some point they went to a casino.”

The girl’s father, Ricardo Flores, told The Associated Press that video cameras tracked the couple as they walked before dawn Sunday to van der Sloot’s hotel from the casino in Lima’s upscale Miraflores district where they met playing poker.

Flores said he doesn’t want the death penalty for van der Sloot, only justice. In Peru, murder carries a prison sentence of up to 35 years.

“I haven’t slept since Monday,” Flores, his eyelids heavy and speech slurred, said in an interview at his Lima home. “I’m waiting for him to step foot on Peruvian
soil.” Then, he said, he’d take a sleeping pill or simply collapse from exhaustion.

The longtime fixture of TV true-crime shows also now faces criminal charges in the United States of trying to extort $250,000 from Holloway’s family in exchange for disclosing the location of Holloway’s body and describing how she died. U.S. prosecutors charged van der Sloot with the crime on Thursday, saying $15,000 had been transferred to a Dutch bank account in his name. In the Netherlands on Friday, prosecutors acting on a U.S. request raided two homes seeking evidence in the case, seizing computers, cell phones and data-storage devices.

She was fully clothed, with multiple bruises and scratches on her body but no signs she had been sexually assaulted, the chief of Peru’s criminal police, Gen. Cesar Guardia, told the AP.

A tennis racket was found in the room “that could have been the murder weapon but that’s so far not been proven,” said Dr. Cesar Tejada, deputy Lima medical examiner.
*
Flores said he hopes his daughter’s death will help investigators solve not just the Holloway case but others of missing girls in which van der Sloot might be responsible.

A New York lawyer for van der Sloot, Joseph Tacopina, had no immediate comment on his client’s predicament. He said he was not yet able to say whether a Peruvian lawyer had been obtained for the young man.

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