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Accused JonBenet killer says death accident: police

Posted on: Thursday, 17 August 2006, 02:42 CDT

By Nopporn Wong-Anan

BANGKOK (Reuters) - An American primary school teacher accused of the grisly Christmas 1996 murder of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey says her death was an accident, a senior Thai policeman said on Thursday.

John Mark Karr, 41, arrested in Bangkok on Wednesday in a dramatic bolt from the blue, was told he was charged with first degree murder, Immigration Police chief Lieutenant-General Suwat Tumroungsiskul told a news conference.

Karr replied: "No, not first degree, it was an accident'," Suwat said.

Karr told police they had fallen in love with each other, Suwat said. "She was very beautiful. So he kidnapped her and killed her by accident," the police chief added.

Karr, slender, sandy haired and dressed in a blue polo shirt and beige corduroy trousers, was impassive as he was presented briefly at a news conference.

He remained stony faced within a ring of policemen as a pack of reporters crowded around, demanding to know whether he was guilty of a murder which threw American media into a frenzy.

He was arrested on a U.S. Federal warrant, which sought his arrest for murder, kidnapping and sexual assault of a child, in the presence of FBI officers after being followed for three weeks as he sought a job teaching English in Bangkok.

"We arrested him yesterday at an apartment not far from my office after having followed him for 21 days," Suwat said. Other officers said Karr had just been hired by one of Bangkok's dozens of international schools.

"During the arrest, we were accompanied by American officers. He has been in and out of Thailand a couple of times and the arrest warrant was issued just a couple of days ago," Suwat said.

"People like him are dangerous. We have criminals from all over the world running away from their home countries to look for teaching jobs in Thailand."

SWIFT EXTRADITION

U.S. media said Karr had been living in JonBenet's hometown of Boulder, Colorado at the time of the murder. The child was found beaten and strangled in the basement of her home on December 26 1996.

Bangkok-based U.S. Homeland Security official Ann Hurst told the news conference Karr would be extradited quickly from a country where the process can take weeks.

"He will be removed to the United States within a week," she said.

The case grabbed big headlines from the start and Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy said the arrest followed "several months of a focused and complex investigation."

At the time of JonBenet's murder, a note was left on a staircase of the family home saying she had been kidnapped by a "small foreign faction" who wanted $118,000 in ransom.

JonBenet's parents, John and Patsy, came under suspicion during the initial investigation and in 2002 they reached an out-of-court cash settlement with a former detective who wrote a book accusing them of murdering their own daughter.

Patsy Ramsey died of ovarian cancer in June. The couple had been informed of the progress of the investigation that led to Karr's arrest.

"So Patsy was aware that authorities were close to making an arrest in the case and had she lived to see this day, would no doubt have been as pleased as I am with today's development almost 10 years after our daughter's murder," John Ramsey said.

Ramsey told KUSA-TV in Denver that, to the best of his knowledge, he was not acquainted with Karr.

No charges were ever filed in the decade since JonBenet was killed, but the murder generated intense media coverage drawn by JonBenet's success in youth beauty pageants, the family's wealth and mysterious elements of the case, including the note.

(Additional reporting by Rosalind Russell and Tanny Chia in Bangkok, Keith Coffman in Boulder, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles and Deborah Charles in Washington)

Source: REUTERS

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