He initially pleaded not guilty in federal court in Birmingham, Alabama, to charges that he had conspired to get Holloway's mother, Beth Holloway, to pay him $250,000 in 2010 in exchange for revealing the location of her daughter's remains.

U.S. District Judge Anna Manasco sentenced him to 20 years in prison, to be served concurrently with his sentence in Peru, followed by three years of supervised release.

He is expected to soon be returned to Peru to complete his sentence there, with an order to return to the U.S. if he is paroled or released.

Holloway, an 18-year-old from a Birmingham suburb, went missing in 2005 during a high school graduation trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba, a territory of the Netherlands.

Eyewitnesses said she was last seen leaving a bar in a car with van der Sloot on the night of her disappearance. While her remains were never found, an Alabama judge declared her legally dead in 2012.