Joran van der Sloot smiles in Peru prison soccer video following report of jailhouse beatdown
The killer of Alabama teen Natalee Holloway smiled for the camera with his inmate soccer team in a video his lawyer shared to show he was fine after denying reports of an assault behind bars.
EXCLUSIVE: Joran van der Sloot's lawyer shared a video with Fox News Digital that showed his client in apparent good health after disputed reports that the man who killed American teen Natalee Holloway and Peruvian heiress Stephany Flores suffered a beatdown behind bars.
In the 41-second clip provided by his Lima-based attorney, Maximo Altez, van der Sloot and his teammates on "La Naranja Mecanica" – Spanish for "The Clockwork Orange" – follow several other prison teams into a gymnasium.
At 6 feet 5 inches tall, van der Sloot towers over everyone else in the room, holding his hand over his heart and grinning as he enters, wearing a blue tracksuit and a newsboy hat.
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In this image taken from video, Joran van der Sloot towers over his soccer teammates in a Peru prison, holding his hand over his heart and wearing a blue tracksuit and newsboy cap. His lawyer, Maximo Altez, shared the video after denying reports that his client had been assaulted by two other inmates in the Peruvian prison. (Maximo Altez)
Altez has denied reports of a two-on-one prison assault against van der Sloot as "fake news" after the 36-year-old killer purportedly went to a prison infirmary for treatment and was said to be a marked man.
"He's fine," the lawyer told Fox News Digital.
A spokesperson for Peru's National Penitentiary Institute told the New York Post last week that two men attacked the Dutch national in prison and that he was treated for cuts and bruises. He was not facing disciplinary action because the assailants were the instigators.
"A lot of people want him dead," the paper quoted the unnamed official as saying.
Peru's Interpol chief, Col. Luis Quiroz, told Fox News Digital that prison officials he spoke with had no information about an alleged assault on van der Sloot.
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Natalee Holloway, center, went missing during a spring break trip in 2005 and was never found. (FBI)
A former inmate who did time with van der Sloot during his brief detention in Alabama last year told the Post that the killer is an arrogant "d--chebag."
"He walks around jail like he’s the boss, demands what he wants, treats other guys like s---," Emil Quinones told the paper. "He made a lot of enemies because he’s such an a--hole."
Van der Sloot is serving his multiple sentences in Peru's mountaintop Challapalca prison, a place Altez previously said he hates so much he was willing to talk to prosecutors in the U.S. in connection to federal extortion charges against him.
Joran van der Sloot smiles as he prepares to leave the airport in Lima, Peru, on June 8, 2023. (Col. Carlos López Aeda for Fox News Digital)
Even so, he is granted conjugal visits there with multiple women for his mental health and rehabilitation under the country's constitution.
It was not immediately clear how van der Sloot's team chose its name, "The Clockwork Orange," but a 1971 Stanley Kubrick movie with the same title is about the botched attempt at rehabilitating the leader of a gang of violent rapists. It was also the nickname given to the 1974 World Cup finalist Dutch National Team – and van der Sloot is Dutch.
Van der Sloot finally admitted in October to killing Holloway with a cinder block on an Aruba beach in 2005 as part of the extortion and fraud case in which he tried to shake down the victim's mother for $250,000. He murdered Flores exactly five years later in a hotel room in her father's casino in Lima.
Outside San Pedro prison in Peru, one poster reads in Spanish, "Stephany Flores asks for justice," and the poster of Joran van der Sloot reads, "Spiritual punishment." In 2012, van der Sloot was sentenced to 28 years in prison for the Flores killing. (AP Photo/Karel Navarro)
In an international plea deal, he is serving his sentence on the U.S. charges for extorting Holloway's mother in Peru.
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However, van der Sloot hates Challapalca, according to his lawyer, Altez, who calls it "hell." The prison is known to see temperatures below freezing on a nightly basis and is so remote that cell service doesn't reach it.
In 2014, Altez told Reuters that his client had been stabbed three times in the prison months after his initial transfer there for unruly behavior. However, officials told the outlet that the wounds looked self-inflicted.
This view shows the entrance of the Challapalca maximum-security prison in Peru, where Joran van der Sloot is serving sentences for the murder of Stephany Flores and for extorting the mother of Natalee Holloway, an 18-year-old Alabama woman he killed in 2005. (AP Photo/Elmer Jilaja)
Van der Sloot previously had his Peruvian sentence extended after a drug and phone smuggling scandal.
Aruba authorities have left open the possibility of prosecuting him there, even though the statute of limitations has expired on Holloway's murder.
Armando Regil Velasco and Fox News' Mitch Picasso contributed to this report.