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Video: Suspect says Holloway’s body dumped ‘like an old rag’

(CNN) — An investigative judge said Sunday that sufficient reason exists to reopen the inquiry against Joran van der Sloot, a suspect in the 2005 disappearance of Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway from the island of Aruba.

The announcement came shortly after Dutch television aired a program in which Van der Sloot told a man he considered to be his friend that he was with the 18-year-old on a beach near her hotel when she died, and that he arranged for a friend to take her body to sea and dump it.

He went out to sea and then he threw her out, like an old rag, he told Aruban businessman Patrick van der Eem on January 16.

Van der Eem recorded their conversations on hidden cameras installed in the Range Rover he was driving, according to the report that aired Sunday night.

Van der Sloot has acknowledged making the remarks, but told an interviewer last week that he was lying.

Aruba’s chief prosecutor, Hans Mos, described the account that aired Sunday night as very impressive, and announced that he was reopening the investigation. Watch CNN’s Frederik Pleitgen report on the new video

But the judge denied a prosecution request that van der Sloot, the son of a lawyer and judge in training, be detained in the Netherlands, where he is a student.

In a written statement, the Office of the Public Prosecutor said Sunday that it will appeal the judge’s decision barring van der Sloot’s arrest, but cautioned that the report does not necessarily solve the case.

There is a big difference between the reality of a courtroom and the reality of a television screen, it said.

On the program, van der Sloot tells the informant that Holloway and her friends had begged him to go out with them the night of May 29, 2005. So the Dutch student said he and two friends — brothers Deepak and Satish Kalpoe — met the women at a bar in Oranjestad. When they arrived, he said, the women appeared to have been drinking heavily and some of them were doing cocaine.

Holloway was on the island with about 100 classmates celebrating their graduation from Mountain Brook High School in suburban Birmingham, Alabama.

After declining an invitation from Holloway to dance on stage with her, he accepted an invitation from her to drink a shot of liquor from her navel as she lay on the bar, he said.

At about 1 a.m. on May 30, he said, she agreed to leave the bar with him and the Kalpoe brothers, telling her friends that she would meet them back at the Marriott Hotel prior to their planned return flight the next day to the United States, he said.

She never arrived.

The three men had previously told authorities that they then drove to the beach with Holloway, leaving her there when she told them she wanted to stay.

But Van der Sloot gave a different account in the hidden-camera footage. He said he wanted to have sex with Holloway, but she told him she did not want to go to her hotel. Instead, she said, she wanted to see sharks, he told the informant.

The two brothers then used their car to drive Van der Sloot and Holloway to the beach by the hotel and left them, Van der Sloot said.

He and Holloway then had sex, he said. But as they were caressing each other, she started shaking, then said nothing, he said.

All of a sudden, what she did was like in a movie, he said. She was shaking, it was awful … I prodded her, there was nothing.

He said he panicked and, when she did not appear to be alive, shook her but was unable to resuscitate her. He said he carried her body to a stand of trees, walked to a pay phone near the pool of the hotel and, instead of using his cell phone, called a friend who owned a boat that was tied up at a nearby dock.

Upon the friend’s arrival, the two men carried Holloway’s body to the boat, and the friend told Van der Sloot to go home, he said. The student then walked back to his house, where his father was asleep when he arrived about 15 minutes later, he recounted. He estimated the time at 2:30 a.m. or 3 a.m.

Van der Sloot said his friend showed up at his house later in the morning and told him he had carried the body out less than a mile from land and dumped it overboard.

He added that the incident with Holloway, whom he knew for only about two hours, has not bothered him.

I didn’t lose a minute of sleep over it, he said.

Last week, Van der Sloot called the Dutch television program Pauw Witteman and acknowledged having made the comments, but said they were lies.

That is what he wanted to hear, so I told him what he wanted to hear, Van der Sloot said. He said he held no ill will toward the reporter, Peter R. de Vries, who worked with the informant to record his conversations.

He is just doing his job, he said.
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Chinese travelers gradually get back on track

GUANGZHOU, China (CNN) — His eyes nearly in tears from the crush of fellow travelers at Guangzhou’s train station, Hong Tao said things were much better on Sunday, after days of waiting for a train to his home in Hubei province.

I think it’s fine today, everything is going smoothly, the 28-year-old said. I thought it would be really crowded but it has turned out to be OK.

Chinese authorities say they expect 1.3 million people to travel out of Guangzhou’s train station over the next few days, as they rush to get home by Wednesday, the eve of Lunar New Year.

Hong’s optimism may have been helped by the blue skies that emerged over Guangzhou on Sunday for the first time in a week.

Last week, a rare winter storm paralyzed China’s transportation system as millions tried to get home to celebrate the holiday — the only chance for many migrant workers to see their families all year. Watch travelers struggle to get home

China’s state-run Xinhua news agency said Friday that 95 percent of rail traffic had returned to normal. But Guangzhou’s train station remained packed with a backlog of hundreds of thousands of travelers hoping to get home for the holiday.

The general sense of frustrated rage of three or four days ago has subsided as Chinese forces gained control of the situation at the station in Guangzhou, the capital of southern Guangdong province, CNN’s Hugh Riminton said Sunday.

There are so many police and also a lot of soldiers, I think they’ve done a great job, said traveler Hu Yue Gu.

A young woman was trampled in a stampede at the train station Friday, and later died of her injuries, according to Xinhua. Video of the situation on Friday showed crowds of people screaming, elbowing each other, in some cases sobbing and collapsing in the rush to get a slot on a train.

Police officers tried to keep order. One officer lifted a small child above the crowd as the child’s mother clutched the officer’s coat. A woman who fainted was carried over the mob to receive medical help.

China Sunday announced it has deployed over 300,000 People’s Liberation Army forces to southern China in what it described as a war on wintry weather.

Since trains were halted last week, some 483,000 passengers have been able to get on trains at Guangzhou, but not without going through a series of choke points that take hours to clear.

If you’re trying to get on a train, you must negotiate each ‘choke point’ — first you approach a barricade where you are held along with thousands of others for about an hour, Riminton said. When that stage clears, you’re squeezed through a gap where you wait at another barricade for another hour. Then, progressively, you are moved closer and closer to where the trains are.

The winter storm — China’s worst in 50 years — has already been blamed for the deaths of at least 63 people around the country, including 25 who died when a bus plunged off a slippery mountain road in the southwestern Guizhou province. The government has reported $7.5 billion in damage from the storm.

The government also announced a $700 million plan to help farmers whose crops have been destroyed.

After transportation around the country began to be shut down Saturday, authorities called on millions of migrant workers to forgo their annual Lunar New Year trip home.

For the sake of their safety, and relieving the stress on transport, I advise migrant workers to stay in the cities where they work, Zheng Guogang, chief of the China Meteorological Administration, told the state newspaper, China Daily.

But for an estimated 200 million people, the annual trek is a critical opportunity to see family — and the vast majority travel by train.

The storm spiraled into a crisis in some areas, with authorities worried about potential loss of critical supplies. Some have already lost power, and local authorities say diesel and even rice could run out in a matter of days.
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