Joran van der Sloot will spend all week at criminal police headquarters being questioned in the death of a 21-year-old Lima woman and has asked to be able to hire his own lawyer, authorities said Sunday.
The Dutchman, 22, who is also the prime suspect in US teen Natalee Holloway’s 2005 disappearance in Aruba, is being held in a cell with a bunk bed and blanket and gets three hot meals a day, spokesman for the Peruvian national police Major Jose Gamboa said.
Van der Sloot is suspected in the May 30 killing of Stephany Flores, a business student who police say he met playing poker at a casino.
Police released video Saturday 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 room’s floor more than two days later, her neck broken.
Van der Sloot crossed into Chile on Monday last week, where he was arrested three days later.
In video taken of the husky van der Sloot that was broadcast Sunday by a TV channel, Peruvian police searched van der Sloot’s belongings in his presence.
They pulled out of his backpack a laptop, a business-card holder and 15 bills in foreign currency. Van der Sloot told police the money included Thai, Cambodian and Bolivian currency. He was asked for credit cards and documents and said in his rudimentary Spanish that they were in a hotel room back in Chile.
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 US attorney, Joseph Tacopina, told reporters.
Dutch embassy chief consular officer Angela Lowe said her government was providing van der Sloot with “regular consular assistance, which means an occasional consular visit and we will make sure he is being treated decently, just like any other inmate.”
She said Peruvian authorities have assured the Dutch government they are treating him well.
If tried and convicted of murder, van der Sloot faces a potential prison term of 35 years.
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