Joran van der Sloot Interrogated: Met Victim Playing Poker
Joran van der Sloot was escorted by authorities in Peru on Saturday. He is the lead suspect in the murder of 21-year-old student, Stephany Flores. Van der Sloot was previously known as the main suspect in the disappearance of Natalie Holloway back in 2005.
Known to online poker players as "AANOTILTKK", van der Sloot had arrived in Lima, Peru last week to attend the Latin American Poker Tour. Gambling911.com revealed yesterday that he was not registered to play but would merely be among the hundreds of expected spectators. Flores was stabbed to death and reportedly beaten badly in a hotel room registered under van der Sloot's name. The two were also seen on casino video surveillance tapes together. Van der Sloot fled the country by foot into Chile some time following Sunday's brutal murder.
Joran van der Sloot arrived at criminal police headquarters in a brown Interpol SUV and was escorted across an auditorium of shouting, shutter-snapping journalists three times, according to the AP news wire.
Wearing a green bulletproof vest, his hands handcuffed behind him, the husky 22-year-old Dutchman stared straight ahead and didn't respond to reporters' questions or even make eye contact.
Outside the police headquarters, seven Indian shamans in brightly colored ponchos repeatedly stabbed a cloth doll representing van der Sloot in a "spiritual punishment" ritual.
"We're punishing him so that all the forces of evil are purged," one shouted.
The Peruvian justice system will ultimately decide van der Sloot's fate in this lifetime, however.
His interrogation began almost immediately, Gen. Cesar Guardia, chief of Peru's criminal police, told The Associated Press.
Van der Sloot did acknowledge that "he met (Flores) and at some point they went to a casino.
He said that at 8:10 a.m., nearly an hour and a half before leaving the hotel, van der Sloot walked across the street alone, bought bread and two cups of coffee at a supermarket and returned to his hotel room.
The girl's father, Ricardo Flores, told the AP that video cameras had also tracked the couple as they walked before dawn Sunday to van der Sloot's hotel from a casino in Lima's upscale Miraflores district where the two met playing poker.
"My daughter was an instrument for this girl (Holloway), so that there can be justice," Flores said. "He's going to have to talk now."
U.S. prosecutors charged van der Sloot with the crime on Thursday, saying $15,000 was 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.
Alistair Prescott, Gambling911.com
