A man connected to the 2005 disappearance in Aruba of Natalee Holloway, an American teenager, will be temporarily extradited to the United States from Peru to face extortion and wire fraud charges, the Peruvian authorities said on Wednesday.
Ms. Holloway disappeared during a trip to the Dutch island with her Alabama high school class at age 18. She was declared dead in 2012, and the unsolved case has long generated great public interest in the United States. First there was intense news coverage, then true-crime books and feature-length films.
The suspect, Joran van der Sloot, is a citizen of the Netherlands who grew up in Aruba and has been linked for years to Ms. Holloway’s disappearance. According to the F.B.I., she was last seen leaving an Aruba nightclub in a car with him and two other young men around 1:30 a.m. on May 30, 2005.
Mr. van der Sloot is in Peru serving a 28-year prison sentence for murder in a separate case: the 2010 strangulation death of Stephany Flores, a 21-year-old Peruvian student. He was sentenced in 2012, aged 24, after pleading guilty.
Around the time of his 2010 arrest in the Flores case, Mr. van der Sloot was indicted by a federal grand jury in Alabama on charges of trying to extort Ms. Holloway’s mother, Beth Holloway, for $250,000 for information about how her daughter died and the location of her body, which has never been found. He accepted an initial payment of $25,000 in an F.B.I. sting operation, and provided what he knew was bogus information, the authorities said then.
The Peruvian Embassy in Washington said in a statement on Wednesday that Mr. van der Sloot would be temporarily handed over to the U.S. for prosecution in the Holloway case.
“We hope that this action will enable a process that will help to bring peace to Mrs. Holloway and to her family, who are grieving in the same way that the Flores family in Peru is grieving for the loss of their daughter, Stephany,” Peru’s ambassador to the United States, Gustavo Meza-Cuadra, said in the statement.
An attorney for Mr. van der Sloot, Maximo Altez, told The Associated Press that he would fight the decision.
