The schoolteacher suspected of murdering American child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey was taken being deported from Thailand today to face possible charges in connection with the 1996 killing.
John Mark Karr (41) confessed to killing the child at her home in Boulder, Colorado last week. He was due to leave Bangkok's international airport at the time of writing.
Karr, who is also from Boulder, told reporters in Bangkok he was with the six-year-old girl when she died at Christmas but that her death was an accident.
He could face charges of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault.
JonBenet was found in the basement of her Boulder home, strangled with a garrote made from a stick and cord. She also had a fractured skull.
Her father discovered the body hours after the girl's mother stumbled on three-page letter claiming she had been kidnapped for a $118,000 ransom.
Karr, arrested in the Thai capital on Wednesday, said he loved JonBenet and answered "no" when asked whether he was an innocent man. But he did not say how she died.
Thai police said Karr was in fair spirits on Sunday.
"He is good, he is okay, he has been eating well," Immigration Police chief Lieutenant-General Suwat Tumroungsiskul said.
The arrest was a surprise development in the case which has drawn intense media coverage focusing on JonBenet's success in child beauty pageants, her family's wealth and mysterious details of the murder, including the bizarre ransom note.
Police arrested Karr a day after he began teaching second grade students at a school in Bangkok, Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy told reporters.
She suggested that the arrest came sooner than she would have liked and the investigation still had some way to go.
Casting doubt on Karr's claim, his ex-wife Lara told KGO-TV in San Francisco, that she was with him in Alabama the entire Christmas season that year and did not believe he could have been involved in JonBenet's murder.