Amsterdam ? Joran van der Sloot, the chief suspect in the murder of one woman and the disappearance of another, suffers mental problems, his mother was quoted Sunday as saying.

Van der Sloot, a 22-year-old Dutchman, is suspected in the disappearance of American teenager Natalee Holloway in Aruba in 2005. He sits now in a prison compound on the dusty outskirts of Peru’s capital, Lima, held on suspicion of killing 21-year-old Stephany Flores on May 30 — five years to the day after Holloway vanished while on vacation.

“My son is sick in his head,” the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf quoted Anita van der Sloot as saying in an interview published on its website Sunday. The comments were her first since her son’s most recent arrest.