Joran van der Sloot says he's been framed, didn't kill Peru girl

Dutchman Joran van der Sloot, from Aruba, has now reversed his guilty plea in regard to the murder of Stephany Flores Ramirez in Peru. He claims his confession was coerced and he should be allowed to go free.

Joran van der Sloot, the Dutchman from Aruba thought to be the killer of tourist Natalee Holloway had his court appearance in Peru today, and retracted his guilty plea for the murder of a Peruvian woman there. Van der Sloot told the Judge that his rights and due process had been violated during his questioning by Peruvian authorities. CNN reports that the judge will now have to decide whether it is legal or not to continue holding van der Sloot in prison. His lawyer, Maximo Altez says that if the ruling is unfavorable to van der Sloot, he is prepared to appeal to the highest court. A Dutch newspaper, De Telegraaf reports that van der Sloot now claims he was "tricked" into confessing to the murder of Peruvian student, Stephany Flores Ramirez. He says the Peruvian police told him if he signed the papers saying he killed her, he would be transferred to the Netherlands.

"In my blind panic I signed everything, but never knew what was written on them."

Van der Sloot was arrested two times in the disappearance of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005, but he was never charged. Hi mother is quoted by De Telegraaf as saying her son is mentally unwell, and that he went to Peru to escape being committed to the high security wing of a psychiatric hospital. Anita van der Sloot told the paper her son suffered severe psychological stress at the early death of his dad, for which he blames himself. The mother says she talked with her son shortly before Flores was killed and, soon after and that he sounded paranoid, saying he was being "followed and watched". She made no denials that he had killed Flores. Even though Joran's statement before the judge today that he was coerced into saying he did it, Peruvian police are defending their interrogation, claiming that van der Sloot's confession was acquired legally. In transcripts of his confession, van der Sloot says he elbowed Flores in the face before strangling her and then suffocating her with his shirt. In the papers,, he says,

"There was blood everywhere, What am I going to do now. I had blood on my shirt. There was also blood on the bed, so, I took my shirt and put it on her face, pressing hard, until I killed Stephany."

Van der Sloot says he attacked Flores May 30 after she read an e-mail on his computer connected with the Holloway case. Van der Sloot says in the transcript that after Flores read the email, she punched him in the face.

"At that moment impulsively, with my right elbow I hit her in the face exactly on top of the nose. I think she started to faint. It affected me so that I grabbed her from the neck and strangled her for a minute."

He was nabbed by police in Chile on June 3 and was returned the next day to Peru. Along with allegedly killing Flores, whose neck was broken, he took money and bank cards from her wallet. While under arrest in Chile, Van der Sloot told police quite a different story of how Flores. Transcripts reveal he blamed the death on robbers who had waited for him at his hotel in Peru. But Peru police say they have overwhelming evidence pointing to van der Sloot as her killer, and when he was transferred to Peru, van der Sloot indeed confessed to the crime. Van der Sloot said he was in Peru for a poker tournament and had met Flores while he was gambling. Police have said they think van der Sloot killed Flores to steal money she won from gambling. Van der Sloot is being held under guard 24-hours a day, in a high-security area of the Miguel Castro Castro prison where only two of 10 cells are occupied, and he has no contact with inmates in the general prison population. If he stays, he may be allowed into the prison's general population.