Federal agents trying to build an extortion case against Joran van der Sloot secretly gave him the cash that wound up funding his trip to Peru, where he killed a young woman exactly five years after the disappearance of Natalee Holloway, The Post has learned.
Van der Sloot tried to shake down Holloway's mother by offering information about her daughter's 2005 disappearance, and agents decided to set him up with a $25,000 payoff, a source told The Post yesterday.
An intermediary acting under the direction of the FBI gave van der Sloot the dough in Aruba on May 10 -- and four days later, he flew to Peru, where he allegedly murdered 21-year-old Stephany Flores in his Lima hotel room.
Van der Sloot was free to travel because after the money was given to the 22-year-old Dutch national, the feds didn't promptly file charges against him. US authorities also did not ask that he be detained in Aruba, even after officials there warned that he was about to leave the island, the source said.
The failure to stop van der Sloot shocked and infuriated Holloway's mom, Beth Twitty. She had been "told that an arrest was going to happen before he left" Aruba, where he was the last person believed to have seen Holloway alive when she vanished, the source said.
Van der Sloot took his payola from the feds -- a $15,000 wire transfer and $10,000 in cash -- and went to Peru to play poker, the source said.
It was only last Thursday -- hours after van der Sloot was nabbed on the lam in Chile for Flores' murder -- that federal prosecutors in Alabama announced they were charging him with extortion and wire fraud in the Holloway shakedown.
Van der Sloot has confessed to beating Flores and breaking her neck in his hotel room on May 30 -- the fifth anniversary of Holloway's disappearance -- according to the confession he gave Peruvian police.
The suspect said he attacked Flores -- whom he had met at a Lima poker tournament -- because she had looked at his laptop computer without permission and found information about his role in the Holloway case.
"I did not want to do it," van der Sloot told cops, according to La Republica newspaper. "The girl intruded in my private life. She had no right.
"I confronted her. She was frightened, we argued, and she wanted to get away. I grabbed her by the neck and hit her."
Van der Sloot is expected to recreate the crime at the scene for cops today.
A coroner in Lima said Flores likely had been beaten to death with a tennis racket found in the room. A source told CNN that van der Sloot admitted to being high on marijuana during the vicious assault.
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