Curacao seeks help in case of missing US diplomat
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico — Investigators in Curacao are asking the public for help solving the disappearance of an American diplomat whose bloodied clothes were found last month on one of the Caribbean island’s beaches.
A police-produced video broadcast over the weekend asks islanders to plug gaps in the last known movements of U.S. Vice Consul James Hogan, who vanished Sept. 24 after leaving home for one of his regular midnight walks. The 10-minute video also includes a request for information about the 49-year-old official’s social life on the Dutch island.
“We want to know just what he does when he leaves the home,” police spokesman Reggie Huggins said Monday. “We need to know if he has other friends maybe his family doesn’t know about. We just want to know where he hangs out and what his social life is.”
A trail of Hogan’s blood was found on rocks leading to the water at Baya Beach, where his clothes were folded neatly in a pile, Huggins said. An expensive kitchen knife and Hogan’s cell phone were found in the water just off the beach, popular for its water sports and its nightlife.
The broadcast included numbers for an anonymous hot line that Huggins said has generated some tips.
“We don’t have a breakthrough yet,” he said. Authorities are still considering “all possibilities” including suicide.
The missing man’s brother, Paul Hogan, said the family would not comment out of concern for the privacy of James Hogan’s wife and five children.
It was after 11 p.m. when Hogan, dressed in sneakers, blue jeans and a blue polo shirt, told his wife he was going for a walk and set out from their home outside the capital, Willemstad. Hogan often took late-night walks for an hour or two, according to Huggins.
Tips provided by islanders so far place Hogan in three different neighborhoods that night as late as 3 a.m.
The video asks for witnesses to come forward if they gave Hogan a ride or saw him walking one of the roads between those neighborhoods. In particular, it asks for information from the driver of a two-door BMW seen in one of the neighborhoods.
Hogan, who has legal residence in Florida, arrived in Curacao in August 2008 for a two-year assignment, according to U.S. State Department records.
Curacao lies about 30 miles (48 kilometers) north of Venezuela and is the headquarters of the Netherlands Antilles government. The U.S. stations military planes at the island’s airport for multinational counter-drug missions in the Caribbean.
In the days after Hogan’s disappearance, the local coast guard and the U.S. Navy scoured the shoreline. Missing-person fliers with Hogan’s photo appeared in newspapers including those in Aruba, the nearby Dutch island where Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway vanished in May 2005 during a high school graduation trip.
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