Between Life and Death: A Few Missing People: Natalee Holloway: Evidence on tape?

And, of course, Joran is in denial, saying this time he was lying. (This from someone who has changed his story more than twenty times!)

From http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/2020/story?id=4239135&page=1 (3-page article):

Holloway Prosecutor to Seek New Arrest Warrant
Aruban
Prosecutor to Appeal a Judge's Decision Denying Him a Warrant for Joran Van der
Sloot

By CHRIS FRANCESCANI
ABC News Law & Justice Unit
Feb. 4, 2008

Police searched the home of Joran van der Sloot
Monday, one day after an undercover video was broadcast on Dutch TV in which he
bragged about having a friend dump the apparently lifeless body of Natalee
Holloway at sea.
The TV report by a Dutch journalist triggered new interest
in the frustrating two-year probe into the disappearance of the Alabama teenager
who vanished during a drunken night in Aruba.
Aruba prosecutors appealed a
judge's refusal to issue a third arrest warrant for Van der Sloot, and police
and journalists were hunting for the man Van der Sloot identified only as
"Daury" who allegedly took Holloway's body out to sea and got rid of it. Already
a Dutch newspaper claims to have spoken to Daury and reported that he denied the
allegation.
ABC News has obtained exclusive U.S. rights to this stunning new
information caught on tape and will air a 90-minute special edition of "20/20:
The Final Hours of Natalee Holloway" Monday at 9:30 p.m. ET.
Investigators
searched two homes in the Netherlands this morning where Van der Sloot lives or
has lived, Aruba's chief public prosecutor Hans Mos said today.
But Mos has
been blocked from issuing a new arrest warrant for Van der Sloot and went to
court to appeal the ruling.
Mos said today he considers undercover tapes
made by Dutch investigative reporter Peter De Vries to be "very valuable
information'' that he believes will ultimately prove to be admissible in court.
"We consider it serious information and very valuable information,'' Mos
told reporters at a press conference here today. "That's why we asked as judge
to reopen the investigation."
A judge granted that request last week, but
denied prosecutors' request for a third arrest warrant. Van der Sloot and two
other Aruban men were arrested in the summer of 2005 and rearrested again last
fall before they were released for lack of evidence in December.
An Aruban
judge "put the threshold very, very high [for an arrest warrant for Van der
Sloot] because, he said, this is the third time you have asked me for a
rearrest,'' Mos said. "This was a tough decision for the judge, and it was also
a tough decision for my office to consider a rearrest for the third time."
Van der Sloot last week insisted he had lied earlier this month when he told
Van der Eem, whom he considered a close friend and confidant, that he'd panicked
when Holloway appeared to go into convulsions during a sexual encounter and
called a friend who took her seemingly lifeless body out to sea.
Mos said he
was unimpressed by those denials.
"That's exactly what we expected him to
do,'' Mos said at a press conference Monday. "This was expected by us. Yet [Van
der Sloot] made these statements not one time, but several times. He repeated
this story."
A key question that remains unanswered is whether the
undercover tapes, 20 hours in all, will be admissible as evidence. Noting that
De Vries' investigation was "private," Mos seemed to indicate that fact would
play in prosecutors' favor.
"We did not influence in any way his gathering
of this information,'' Mos said.
Independent attorneys on Aruba have
questioned the validity of the tapes in a court of law.
"The evidence has to
be legally acceptable to a judge,'' said Aruban attorney Chris Lejuez. "If a
policeman would be involved in an investigation like [De Vries'] without the
proper instruction from a judge, it would not be legally acceptable."
Still,
Lejuez said, De Vries is "a very well known Dutch reporter who has solved many
other complex cases. He has become famous for this. He has solved cases nobody
else thought could be solved, using, of course, his own methods."
This is
the second set of prosecutors who have sought to solve the disappearance of
Natalee Holloway, who was visiting Aruba on a high school graduation class trip.
She met Van der Sloot and two other local men at a raucous nightclub called
Carlos N' Charlies. From there, she and Van der Sloot went to a beach in the
early morning hours for an amorous encounter.
Van der Sloot, who had
steadfastly insisted for more than two years that he left the young woman there
on the beach, has long been the key suspect in the case.
Last May, a fresh team of police investigators and prosecutors headed by
Mos took over the vexing case in the hope that new eyes would find new leads to
follow. That same month, Deepak and Satish Kalpoe, who were with Van der Sloot
the night he met Holloway, were briefly rearrested and a surprise search was
conducted of their home, a modest, neon-green, single-story house near the base
of Hooiberg Mountain.
During the May search of the home, investigators
allegedly planted bugs there so they could monitor the brothers' conversations,
defense attorneys claimed.
Because of information gleaned from those
wiretaps, all three men were rearrested last fall, but were all released for
lack of evidence. Late last year, Mos announced that the case would be closed,
essentially admitting defeat.
It was after that December release that De
Vries' undercover investigation began in earnest.