Joran van der Sloot, Natalee Holloway Disappearance Suspect, to face U.S. charges

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, then 18, disappeared during a trip to the Dutch island with her Alabama high school class. She was declared dead in 2012, and the unsolved case has long sparked intense public interest, inspiring several true-crime books and television programs in the United States.

The suspect, Joran van der Sloot, is from Aruba and, as one of the last people to be seen with Ms. Holloway, has been linked to her disappearance for years. He is in Peru serving a 28-year prison sentence in a separate case: the 2010 murder of Stephany Flores, a 21-year-old Peruvian student.

Also in 2010, 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.