Dutchman formerly tied to Joran van der Sloot arrested in Spain

The police in Spain arrested a former benefactor and accomplice of Joran van der Sloot in a hotel in San Sebastian on Friday night. It concerns 34-year-old Stan P. from Valkenburg, a cybersecurity consultant who used to pay large amounts to Van der Sloot and helped him try to extort an alleged pedophile, AD reports.

P. and his wife were arrested after an Interpol investigation, his mother-in-law said in a chat conversation AD saw. The police confirmed that they arrested a man and a woman after an international arrest warrant from the Dutch authorities but would give the newspaper no names. The reason for the arrest is unknown.

According to AD, P. made a lot of money in recent years by defrauding and manipulating online casinos. The authorities in Peru believe he paid some 350,000 euros of his criminal earnings to Leidy Figueroa, Van der Sloot’s girlfriend.

P. and Van der Sloot met in a casino in 2008, three years after Natalee Holloway’s disappearance, and became close friends. According to AD, P. hated how the media portrayed van der Sloot. He regularly transferred large amounts to him.

In 2010, around the time of Stephany Flores’ murder in Peru, for which Van der Sloot is currently serving time, Van der Sloot ran into money problems. Two days before Flores’s murder, he told P. his hotel would evict him. P. suggested several options for Van der Sloot to make money quickly. Among them was extorting men P. knew to have child pornography on their computers. “I’ll just threaten to go to the police. We can blackmail him,” P. wrote in texts AD saw.

After Flores’ murder, P. and Van der Sloot remained friends. In a conversation between the two men posted on YouTube, Van der Sloot complains from the Peruvian prison that he is lonely and that his girlfriend doesn’t want to come to prison with their child. P. calls Van der Sloot “darling” and says he can’t imagine that he is a bad person.

In recent years, the two men seem to have drifted apart, AD wrote. P. became increasingly interested in the spiritual world, Robbert van den Broeke, a self-proclaimed paranormal medium in Noord-Brabant, told the newspaper. “We’ve been talking to each other every day lately,” Van den Broeke said. “He sent me a message an hour before his arrest.”

Van den Broeke worries about P. being in prison. “He is very vulnerable and insecure. Stan has Asperger’s and an autistic disorder. This arrest must have affected him. Stan may have done wrong things, but he did everything with a good heart. Stan just wanted to help people in need. He saw himself as a modern-day Robin Hood.”