Birmingham, Al (WIAT) Here in Alabama we think of Joran van der Sloot in terms of Natalee Holloway. He's the prime suspect in the disappearance of the Mountain Brook teen on a graduation trip to Aruba five years ago.
In Peru the Holloway connection is context...the main focus of attention is the murder...five years to the day after Natalee's disappearance...of Stephany Flores. The 21 year old student apparently met van der Sloot at a casino during a session of the Latin American Poker Tour. Security cameras later showed them entering his Lima hotel room where her murdered body was later found.
So in Peru it's a lurid local murder case, albeit with international overtones ranging from Peru to Aruba to Alabama to the Netherlands and even Thailand.
But the questions being asked everywhere are pretty much the same. Did he do it? Is he some sort of serial killer? Is he nuts? Will an insanity defense hold up in a Peruvian court?
Van der Sloot has confessed to the murder but is trying to get that confession thrown out on a variety of grounds ranging from improper legal representation to coercion. That appeal has been rejected. So the focus in Peruvian coverage has been on defense strategy. After a court ordered examination the defense team is left arguing that their client is more mentally ill than the court appointed doctors think he is.
Here's a sampling for Peruvian media websites:
From
Peru21"He was lucid and oriented to time and space. He knew what was going to do and calculated everything. He was never unconscious of reality and could not claim it was because of violent emotion, "said the forensic psychiatrist Silvia Rojas.
The Lima daily
El Comercio also focused on the problems the court ordered exam is causing the defense team, quoting the local television program Prensa Libre. "According to doctors consulted by "Prensa Libre", Joran van der Sloot did not lose consciousness at the time he committed the crime. In that sense you can not claim that he fell into an extreme emotion."
And the English language website
Living in Peru strikes the same theme: The latest public declarations of his Peruvian lawyer, Máximo Altez, stress that van der Sloot is “a sick person.”
During an interview for a local TV news program, Altez emphasized that “any psychiatric assessment performed on him, either here or in any other country, will indicate that Joran is a sick person.”
