Month: June 2010

 Arrest warrant issued for van der Sloot after woman’s death

A young Dutchman previously arrested in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway is the prime suspect in a weekend murder of a Peruvian woman, police said Wednesday.

Joran van der Sloot is being sought in the Sunday killing of 21-year-old Stephany Flores in a Lima hotel, Criminal police chief Gen. Cesar Guardia told a news conference. He said the suspect fled the country the next day by land to Chile.

The Dutch government said Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for Van der Sloot.

Guardia said the 22-year-old Dutchman, who was in the country for a poker tournament, appears with the young woman in a video taken at a Lima casino early Sunday.

The victim’s father, Ricardo Flores, told reporters she was killed about 8 a.m. in a hotel room in the upscale Miraflores neighborhood that was splattered with blood, indicating a struggle.

El Comercio newspaper in Lima reported that Flores was stabbed. Her father is a businessman and race car driver.

The killing occurred exactly five years after the May 30, 2005, disappearance of Holloway in Aruba, a Dutch Caribbean island.

“We have an interview with a worker at the hotel who says she saw this foreigner with the victim enter his room,” said Guardia.

Van der Sloot left Peru on Monday, Guardia said, according to an immigration registry. He had been staying at the hotel since May 14 and checked out on Sunday four hours after he arrived there with the victim, the police general added.

A document obtained by NBC News from Peru’s Dirección General de Migraciones states that Van Der Sloot left Peru on Monday via land to Chile at 1:42 p.m. local time. The document also states he arrived in Peru via Colombia on an Avianca flight on May 14.

Interpol has issued an international arrest warrant for Van der Sloot, Dutch Foreign Ministry spokesman Bengt van Loosdrecht told The Associated Press in The Netherlands.

He cited as his sources Peruvian police and the Dutch Embassy in Lima. The embassy’s head of consular affairs, Angela Lowe, told the AP she could not comment on the case.

An attorney for Van der Sloot in New York City, Joe Tacopina, said he did not know his client’s whereabouts and has not been in touch with him since the Peru allegations emerged.

Tacopina cautioned against a rush to judgment.

“Joran van der Sloot has been falsely accused of murder once before. The fact is he wears a bull’s-eye on his back now and he is a quote-unquote usual suspect when it comes to allegations of foul play,” Tacopina said.

Van der Sloot was twice arrested but later released for lack of evidence in the 2005 disappearance of Holloway, who was on a high school graduation trip to the Caribbean island.

No trace of her has been found and van der Sloot remains the main suspect in the case, said Ann Angela, spokeswoman for the Aruba prosecutor’s office.

Sad anniversary for Natalee Holloway’s mom
May 30: Beth Holloway tells TODAY she isn’t giving up on her quest to find out what happened to her daughter.

“What’s happening now is incredible,” she said. “At this moment we don’t have anything to do with it, but we are following the case with great interest and if Peruvian authorities would need us, we are here.”

Van der Sloot’s late father was a prominent judge in Aruba.

The mystery of Holloway’s disappearance has garnered wide attention on television and in newspapers in Europe and the United States.

Holloway, 18, of Mountain Brook, Ala., was last seen in public leaving a bar on Aruba with van der Sloot and two Surinamese brothers — Deepak and Satish Kalpoe — hours before she was due to board a flight home from the school trip.

Two years ago, a Dutch television crime reporter captured hidden-camera footage of Van der Sloot saying he was with Holloway when she collapsed on a beach, drunk. He said he believed she was dead and asked a friend to dump her body in the sea.

Judges subsequently refused to arrest van der Sloot on the basis of the tape.

Chief prosecutor Peter Blanken told NBC News in February that the suspect’s story was “very unbelievable,” and no charges followed the confession.

“The locations, names and times he gave just did not make sense,” Blanken told NBC News.

The Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf quoted Blanken as saying that van der Sloot’s statement was “held together by lies and fantasy.”

The interview was not aired by German broadcaster RTL because of doubts about whether van der Sloot was telling the truth, Blanken added.

Van der Sloot claimed that Holloway had died accidentally and insisted that he did not kill her, Blanken said. 

…Why can’t they eventually suck all the oil out of the sea water and salvage it somehow? Once this well is capped or this leak is plugged or whatever they need to do, they should just start sucking oil right out of the water. What do you think? Do they have the technology to do that? The answer in a moment. But first this from The Crab CookerThe answer is: Fuck no, they don’t have that technology. Unless I miss my guess, Jeeves.

I didn’t think it could suck anymore than it already does but, by God, watching it on AMC  fills the bill.Let’s see. Where to begin. Number one, all the gangs they show at the beginning of the film are horseshit. While there has been talk down through the years of the “Plug Uglies” or “The Chichesters,” for instance,  there is little evidence that any so-called gangs existed with those names. Possibly there were groups of three or four who dressed a certain way and may have even referred to themselves with names such as those from time to time but that does not necessarily qualify them for gang-hood. For instance, a “Plug Uglie” was supposedly identified by his leather banded hat stuffed with rags. It made a kind of helmet. Maybe there were guys who wore hats like that and even called themselves Plug-Uglies. But an entire gang? Hardly. Anyway, do some discriminating reading on the subject and you’ll find that the most violent “gangs” of the era were associated with politicians and political candidates. There were running battles in the streets for decades around elections and also the curious situation in New York regarding their fire departments. That’s right, plural The Metropolitan Fire Department and the Municipal Fire Department. They were rival fire departments because fire departments had lots of power…still do…and in those days they used that power to get their own people elected and to get their share and more of public money. Corrupt? Oh, hell yes. The state of New York eventually had to intercede after the situation got so bad firemen would let buildings burn unless someone came up with the right amount of money on the spot to get them to put it out. And they battled each other, the Municipals and the Metropolitans, using their own gangs of street-fighters. The worst feature, though, of the film “The Gangs Of New York” is the portrayal, in true Hollywood fashion, of Union soldiers as a slaughtering force during the 1863 Draft Riots. The slo-mo at the end of an Irish street hood meeting his doom is meant to be poignant, to touch the heart. A man yearning to breath free while the police machine cuts him down. What a slander. The Union Army in New York, called there right off the battlefields of Gettysburg, saved many lives including those of black orphans whose home was set aflame by the rioters. The children were placed on a barge in the middle of the East River until calm had been restored. These soldiers, fresh from combat with Lee’s army, were not about to brook anything from a mob of murderers. It was a call to duty answered with honor. “The Gangs Of New York” tries to disgrace that. Blow it out your rectum, Scorcese.

Attorney Darren Brown joined Phil for a discussion of the lawsuit against Google whereby a woman got hit by a car after using the Google Maps direction feature. Is it frivolous? Hardly, according to Darren. Google is a big company. They can afford it. The thing that is unjust to Darren is that the lawyer representing the plaintiff in the Google case got there first while Darren and the rest of the lawyers of the world have to wait in line for their big shot. He was gonna sue BP and then along came the oil leak and  that trumped his chicken-crap credit card class-action.A-Team van

Jay Santos of the Citizens Auxiliary Police announced tonight that he and his subcommanders will be outside theaters throughout Southern California on June 11 when “The A Team” comes out. They’ll be asking people in line questions and looking over their apparel to make sure none of them are “hyper-patriotic” and are likely to come out of the theater “and want to go and buy a van and blow things up.”