Police in Chile are checking hotels for a young Dutchman long suspected in the 2005 disappearance of US teen Natalee Holloway who is now being sought in the killing of a woman in Peru.
After Peruvian officials announced on Wednesday that Joran van der Sloot is the prime suspect in the death of 21-year-old Stephany Flores in a Lima hotel, Chilean police confirmed he had entered their country two days earlier.
Chilean Police Inspector Douglas Rodriguez in Arica told reporters there was no record of van der Sloot leaving Chile and authorities were searching the country’s dry, sparsely populated northern provinces for him.
In Lima, police General Cesar Guardia said at a news conference that the slain woman was found on Wednesday in a room at a hotel where van der Sloot had been staying and that she had been seen with the suspect early on Sunday, when she was killed.
The killing occurred exactly five years after the May 30, 2005, disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway during a high school trip in Aruba, a Dutch Caribbean island where van der Sloot’s late father was a prominent judge.
Prosecutors said van der Sloot is still their main suspect in the case even though he was never charged.
The Dutch government said Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for van der Sloot in the Peru killing, but Rodriguez, the Chilean police official, said authorities there had received only a request to locate the suspect, not an arrest warrant.
Guardia, the Peruvian police general, said the 22-year-old Dutchman was in Peru for a poker tournament and appears with the dead woman in a video taken at a Lima casino early on Sunday. The two were later seen entering the hotel by one of its employees at about 5am and the Dutchman departed alone about four hours later, he said.
“We have an interview with a worker at the hotel who says she saw this foreigner with the victim enter his room,” Guardia said.
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