Birmingham, Alabama (WIAT) Peruvian prosecutors have rejected a plea by Stephany Flores' family to have Joran van der Sloot charged with "robbery with murder" which would have carried a possible life sentence. Instead, the prosecution wants to stick with "murder followed by robbery" which carries a 30 year max.
Pablo Sánchez Velarde,the public prosecutor in the Peruvian capital Lima, says he will maintain the original charge of murder against Dutch citizen Joran van der Sloot. He characterised the charge as ‘clear and coherent’.
The semantics mean decades less sentence for the Dutchman who has already admitted he killed Stephany, a 21 year old student he met at a poker tournament. Her corpse was found in van der Sloot's Lima hotel room five years to the day of Natalee Holloway's disappearance on a graduation trip to Aruba. The Mountain Brook teen was last seen leaving an Oranjestad bar with van der Sloot and two other local teens.
Van der Sloot told investigators in Peru that he killed Stephany Flores after she found material about Natalee on a laptop in his hotel room. He's claiming the equivalent of a crime of passion. Police investigators say he killed and robbed her because he was broke and desperate.
Although questioned by Aruban authorities after Natalee Holloway vanished, van der Sloot was never charged in that case. He is still considered by many, including the Holloway family, as the prime suspect in the case.
He also faces a federal indictment here in the U.S. for wire fraud and extortion. Those indictments were brought by a federal grand jury here in Birmingham after the FBI presented evidence van der Sloot had taken money for the Holloway family in exchange for information about Natalee's fate. They say he took the money but never produced the information.
