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Re: Natalee Case Discussion #790 1/3/09 -
« Reply #809 on: January 06, 2009, 07:14:06 PM »Press Anouncement
Ladies and gentlemen!
The Public Prosecutors Office Aruba and the Aruban Police Force would like to give you an updated summary about the investigation into the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.
Why? Three reasons
First of all there is the fact that a few months ago, based on the results of the investigation, the estimate was that the investigation could be ended by the end of 2008. More specifically I am referring to the re-opened investigation into the suspect in this case, Joran van der Sloot, against whom the criminal investigation was restarted after the broadcast of a Peter R. de Vries investigation last February. Because that program caused a new stream of information, this information first has to be examined which will take at least another few months.
Secondly, about six weeks ago an interview with Joran van der Sloot was broadcasted on an American cable news Channel. In this interview Joran tells a completely new version of the alleged facts that occurred concerning the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. Before showing the interview and in the days after the show the Aruban Prosecutors Office and the Aruban Police were alleged to be corrupt and unwilling to investigate possible leads in this case. We find it fit to address those allegations today.
The third reason is that my Office and the Police Department would like to urge all people that have information about things that have occurred on May 30th 2005 or about persons that are or might be involved in this case, whatever that information may be, to hand that information over to the Police or to the Public Prosecutors Office.
For a good understanding of the facts I would like to take you back to December 18th 2007. It was on that day that the three suspects in this case got official notice from my Office that the criminal investigation into their possible involvement in this case was ended. This did not mean that the investigation into the disappearance of Natalee Holloway also ended. On the contrary. That investigation never stopped. If new information or evidence would come up, the criminal investigation against any suspect in this case could be re-opened. This is possible as long as the statute of limitations does not prohibit this.
No one could imagine at that time that within a month from that decision this Office was confronted with the information that Dutch crime investigator Peter R de Vries had made secret camera shots of Joran van der Sloot talking about the case against a civilian under cover. After my Office got the tapes and before the actual broadcast of the Peter R. de Vries program, on our request the criminal investigation against Joran was re-opened by the investigating judge.
At the same time the investigation was fully operational again and had as a main goal to find as much corroborating evidence as possible of what Joran van der Sloot had told the under cover. The judge was asked to approve the third consecutive custody of Joran van der Sloot. The investigating judge against whose decision this Office lodged an appeal at the Common Court of Appeal in Curacao denied this approval. The Court of Appeal upheld the investigating judges’ decision, thus disabling Police to re-arrest Joran van der Sloot.
It is proper to take another look at the Court of Appeals’ decision. The Court of Appeal took into account the footage that was handed over by Peter de Vries as well as all the old investigative results of over nearly 3 years of investigation. Weighing whether there was enough new serious material, evidence (necessary to be able to put one into custody) the Court decided that the new elements that Joran had told the under cover were not corroborated by “objective facts”. On top of that the Court considered the fact that the suspect already had argued that there are objective facts that contradict the new elements that were told by him to the under cover. The fact that Joran has supplied the Police with a motive for his lying behavior and the fact that he has admitted that he often is not telling the truth, makes, according to the Court of Appeal, that the self incriminating new statements of Joran are devaluated.
In short: there is no corroborating evidence for the new self incriminating statements of Joran and the value of these statements is undermined by his own statement about his credibility.
What does the Court’s decision imply when we take a closer look?
1. After an extensive and intensive investigation, the contents of the Police file combined with the new statements of Joran, does not hold enough evidence necessary to pass the threshold for a third consecutive term of pretrial custody.
2. Logical conclusion from the above mentioned must be, that the evidence that we do have in the extensive files, is not enough to convict this suspect.
For that reason this Office has made the gathering of these “objective facts” that can serve as evidence against the main suspect it’s primary goal for the investigation from that point on.
What the Police and this Office have done:
• Already on January 22nd 2008, the day after Peter de Vries had shown the tapes to the Public Prosecutor and the Police, the investigation into the person called “Daury” was started. Finally a person called Daury R. was identified and it turned out that he probably was involved in drug trafficking activities (as had been told by Joran). Because of that and following his own TV-appearance on 20-20, he was arrested in the USA on the suspicion of international drug trafficking. He is currently detained in the USA.
• Investigation into the pay phone in the hotel garden was started as well as finding an answer to the question whether Joran had the possession of a credit card (necessary to use the phone).
• On our request the National Prosecutor’s Office in Rotterdam as well as The National Crime Squad executed numerous requests, such as various house searches and finally the questioning of Joran van der Sloot.
• Since then over 20 witnesses were interviewed, some of them for the second or third time. These interviews pertained mostly to Joran’s missing shoes and the person called “Daury”, Joran’s alleged accomplice.
• Amongst the witnesses were the two brothers who previously were suspects in this case but who, by the new statements of Joran, received an alibi from Joran, when he told the under cover that the two brothers are “jerks” who don’t know anything about what had happened.
• During his stay on Aruba the Police twice interviewed under cover “Patrick”.
Besides the Police investigation Peter de Vries’ program received an enormous amount of information. The serious tips were passed on to my Office in order to have them investigated.
Four of them could be investigated and led to thorough investigation.
Furthermore investigation was conducted into the statement of a fisherman, until that moment unknown by the Police or my Office. This witness, known by the Holloway family, claimed that in the night of the disappearance of Natalee Holloway a large knife was stolen from one of the Fisherman’s huts while at the same time a large crab cage was missing that at least was there until the month of April. This owner of the cage was also interviewed by the Police but told them that this allegedly missing cage had never been left at the huts but was always taken home.
He told the Police that Mrs. Holloway and the press approached him a long time ago and that he had told them his story. His identity was never officially revealed to the Police. It was because the Persistence ship at that time was searching for relevant material on the sea bed that the story about the cage and the fisherman came up in a conversation between this Office and Mr. Dave Holloway, which led this Office to the identity of the witness.
As you may know, the expedition of the Persistence led to only one finding that was supposed to be relevant to this case. Special Police divers brought certain material to the surface of which one might assume could be the clothes of Natalee Holloway. These samples were sent to the FBI laboratory. After examination by the FBI the result was that these samples did not match the clothes of Natalee.
In the month of March 2008 a witness who was urged by Dave Holloway to step forward confronted the Prosecutor’s Office. The man gave a statement on March 16th 2008 accompanied by his lawyer. This witness statement is already widely known: the witness claims he saw Joran van der Sloot in the middle of the night of May 30th walking in front of his house, soaked up to his chest, walking on one shoe and heavily breathing. He was walking into the direction of the hotels, coming from the direction of the Church at Noord. What the witness was actually aiming for was the Police to conduct an intensive search in the dam of Monserrat. Nevertheless the witness could not give us any reason why the Police should conduct a search in the dam. It was the conclusion of the witness that Joran had come from the dam since he came walking from that direction. There was no indication whatsoever that Joran had been at the dam. For that reason the Police were not ordered to conduct that search. Later, people from the Persistence asked if they were allowed to conduct a search. They were told that they could go ahead if the wanted to. No results were reported. Besides that, the Monserrat dam, which had completely fallen dry by that time, was not long before that request completely searched by dozens of people, for a completely different reason. No results were reported.
This witness has turned himself to Dave Holloway, as we have been told. He has given a new statement and has undergone a lie detector test. According to the summary of the lie detector test results
(a full report, as promised to my Office by Tim Miller was never received) the witness was considered to be reliable. This Office never questioned the reliability of what the witness claimed to have seen. Yet, the value of his statement in the reconstruction of facts of that night is very limited. With his sole statement this case could never be solved.
Police and the Prosecutor’s Office are being accused of not following leads in this investigation. Those allegations are unjust and unfounded. Of course it is true that we weigh the information and the source on credibility and value before we start to investigate. But witnesses, who claim to have leads that find no ground in facts whatsoever and therefore are not being investigated by the Police, are free to investigate those themselves. This - of course – within the limitations imposed by law.
I will give you three examples of what we have experienced the last 10 months in terms of leads given by people who claim to have special powers and know where Natalee would be.
The first one claimed that Natalee was in the hands of foreign criminals but could not give us any actual lead to follow.
The second one recently claimed that the girl was buried on an Aruba beach. After consulting my Office and the Police a private search was conducted, only facilitated by the Police. No result was reported.
The third person was very persistent and claimed he had witnesses he could not disclose to my Office. He claimed Natalee was buried under a hotel that was under construction at the time of her disappearance. He requested that my Office would order a hole to be drilled in the hotel floor in order to conduct an endoscopic search underneath the hotel. When the prosecutor asked the man for the undisclosed witnesses and kept asking for his sources, he finally admitted that his theory was based on a dream.
As you can see, this is just a part of what we have experienced over the past months. There is much more of these “leads” which take us an awful lot of time and distract us from the actual investigation. We do not obstruct anyone, but when there is no concrete information or the information is unreliable we chose not to investigate that lead or that information. In that respect the Aruban Police is not different from any other Police force in the world.
CONCLUDING:
This I can tell you: during the investigation of which you just received an overview, a series of investigative acts were conducted. I will not disclose the results of that investigation here and now because the investigation is not yet finished and my Office does not want to disclose these results to the suspect and thus make him wiser even before he has been confronted with these results. Only as soon as the investigation into the new statements of Joran van der Sloot has been completely finalized, the suspect will be notified about the decision by my Office whether he will be charged or not. At that time the public also will be informed. If possible investigative results may be disclosed to the public.
When will the investigation be completed?
At this moment the last leads and some minor details are under investigation. These minor questions first have to be answered before a decision can be made. The Public Prosecutor’s Office expects to have conducted the necessary investigations within a number of months. Exact data cannot be determined.
Furthermore I would like to say this.
Recently Fox broadcast an interview of Joran van der Sloot recorded by Greta van Susteren in the spring of 2008. In this interview Joran presents yet another new version of the facts. This time he claims he has sold Natalee Holloway on the beach for $ 10,000 to a person called `Adamovic´ after a prearranged agreement. This man had taken the girl from the beach on a boat and sailed away.
Although Fox already had the possession of this information for nearly 6 months, it waited to disclose it to the public by the end of November 2008. A request by my Office to provide this information to us digitally was left unanswered.
Now suddenly Fox and a lawyer demand that my Office shall conduct an intensive investigation into a story of which the anchor of the program herself already considered the possibility that it could be “a wild goose chase”. Furthermore Joran van der Sloot after the interview was taped, denied that what he said was true. The Fox program also showed an interview with Joran´s American lawyer, in which the program’s anchor implicitly admitted that Joran was paid for the interview. Finally Fox broadcasts a so-called telephone conversation between Joran and his father. The contents of that phone call are supposed to corroborate Joran´s new story. The taped conversation between Joran and his father recently has been downloaded from the Internet by the Police and handed over to the Dutch Forensic Institute. This independent institute, the NFI, has been requested by the Police and my Office to conduct a voice-comparing investigation between the voice on that tape and earlier recordings of Paul van der Sloot. Within a few months we will know whether the material can be investigated and if so, what the results will be.
It is more than remarkable that no longer than 5 months after Joran´s so called confessions were taped on hidden cameras by Peter R. de Vries, statements both in the Netherlands and in the USA considered as “the solving of the case”, this Joran now comes forward with a completely different new story. Now this story is being considered as one that urgently has to be investigated. This while there are many indications that Joran simply pulled Fox’s leg and earned himself a lot of money as well. To prove that we are dealing with “a wild goose chase”, the Police on our request have checked some verifiable parts from Joran´s new statement, which show that it is a wild goose chase.
The Holloway family lawyer, who demanded the immediate arrest of suspects, was told that the Public Prosecutor, given the legal requirements, couldn’t find any ground in this interview to order an arrest.
Final remarks
Police and the Prosecutor’s Office on Aruba are still conducting an investigation into the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. Yet we are approaching the end of this lengthy investigation and are busy with the last two leads. Now we are still busy I would like to add this: if you have relevant information, no matter how small or uninteresting it may seem, please notify my Office or the Police here on Aruba.
The purpose of the criminal investigation is to establish beyond reasonable doubt what has happened to Natalee Holloway on the night of May 30th 2005. Have crimes been committed against her and, if so, which crimes and by whom? And if someone is responsible for crimes committed, that person, whoever he may be, should be held accountable for those crimes in a court of law. Yet that result still has not been met.
In short: it is the Police and the Prosecutor’s Office that have, and should have, the primary responsibility for a criminal investigation. That is the way it is legally laid down in our judicial system. If others want to help, we will applaud them doing so. Yet, when those activities start to get counter productive and under circumstances jeopardizes the investigation, we should address the public and make them aware of these effects.
In order to prevent that happening we thought it fit to inform you through this press conference.
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