Holloway suspect got cash in sting

WASHINGTON – The FBI thought it was closing in on Joran Van der Sloot in the notorious Natalee Holloway missing-teenager case, and he was videotaped and paid $25,000 in a sting operation. But when the agency delayed his arrest to help build a criminal case, he took the money and headed for Peru, where authorities say he now has confessed to killing a different young woman.

The investigation of Van der Sloot in the Alabama teenager’s case simply was not far enough along to have him arrested, the FBI and the U.S. attorney’s office in Birmingham said Wednesday.

Holloway disappeared on the island of Aruba on May 30, 2005.

Van der Sloot is now expected to be charged with murder in Peru in the killing, exactly five years later, of 21-year-old business student Stephany Flores, the daughter of a Peruvian circus promoter and former race car driver whom he meet playing poker at a casino.

In his hotel room, Van der Sloot strangled Flores with his two hands and smashed her in the face with an elbow, the chief of Peru’s criminal police, Gen. Cesar Guardia, told the Associated Press in Lima on Wednesday.

Guardia said Van der Sloot attested in his confession Monday that he killed Flores because she found out about the Aruba case by using his laptop without his permission.

U.S. law enforcement officials and a private investigator said the work on Holloway’s disappearance was revived in April when Van der Sloot reached out to a lawyer for Holloway’s mother and requested $250,000 in exchange for disclosing the location of the young woman’s body on the island of Aruba.

He got $25,000, and the private investigator says the suspect was taped saying he pushed her down, she hit her head and died. But the statement from the FBI and U.S. attorney’s office said the law enforcement probe “was not sufficiently developed to bring charges prior to the time Van der Sloot left Aruba.”

Aruba authorities have been frustrated in their efforts to prosecute Van der Sloot because they have been unable to find her remains.

According to the private investigator, Bo Dietl, messages started coming in to John Kelly, a lawyer for the Holloway family who had hired Dietl, around Easter of this year from Van der Sloot. Van der Sloot, for years the prime suspect in Holloway’s disappearance, wanted to give details of where Holloway was buried and how she died.

The FBI set up a sting operation and told Van der Sloot he would receive $25,000 immediately and $225,000 more once the body was found.