Natalee Holloway: The "new evidence", case closed

However, the search effort is still happening! On http://nholloway.blogspot.com/ they posted this message on Tuesday (Dec. 18):

Tuesday, 18-Dec - 1500 hrs:Aruba authorities and prosecutors close the Holloway
case and investigation and said they do not have the evidence to charge anyone.
Prosecutors said they will reopen the case "if new serious evidence were to be
found." The statute of limitations is six years for involuntary manslaughter and
12 years for homicide, they said. Regardless, this announcement WILL NOT affect
the search by the Persistence. This announcement comes the day before the search
team will begin the side scan sonar survey of the newly-mapped area.

There are more recent updates on the search also posted. It talks about the first day of the side-scan sonar (and finding an old shipwreck!) and about using a magnetometer.

Anyway, article (and above photo) from http://www.kitv.com/news/14896880/detail.html :

Suspect During Chat: Holloway Is Dead
Evidence Gathered Over Last Eight
Months
POSTED: 4:35 am HST December 20, 2007

ORANJESTAD, Aruba
-- Prosecutors in Aruba were releasing evidence from the investigation into the
disappearance of an American teen.
The country's chief prosecutor said the
file includes an Internet chat session in which one of the three top suspects in
the case said Natalee Holloway is dead.
The Alabama high school student
vanished during a May 2005 vacation in Aruba with her graduating class. Her body
has never been found.
The prosecutor didn't reveal the identity of the
person who wrote the message.
But he said its discovery helped lead to the
recent decision to re-arrest the three suspects.
All three have since been
released. The Aruba Public Prosecutor's Office said this week it won't charge
them.
Prosecutors said the re-arrests had been warranted by the
circumstantial evidence.
Those include witness statements saying the
suspects had been behaving strangely in the hours after Holloway vanished.
They have said they still believe the trio was somehow involved in
Holloway's disappearance, but can't prove it because no body has turned up.

Ugh, so frustrating! Unless the unnamed suspect was just repeating what most people have been assuming, one would hope that statement alone would have made a difference!
Anyway, if you know what happened to Natalee, please call the FBI tipline at 1-877-628-2533.

Natalee's website: http://www.allpointsbulletin.org/Natalee_Holloway.html
Another blog about Natalee: http://blogsfornatalee.com/