JonBenet suspect arrives in US from Thailand

LOS ANGELES, Aug 21 (Reuters) The American schoolteacher suspected of murdering child beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey arrived last night in the United States, where he will face questioning about the 1996 killing.

John Mark Karr, 41, landed in Los Angeles at around 9:30 pm after traveling in business class from Bangkok, Thailand with US law enforcement officials aboard a Thai Airways flight.

A spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said local officials would detain him for up to 48 hours pending an extradition hearing before he would be sent to Colorado, where the murder occurred.

Karr was arrested in Bangkok on Wednesday on suspicion of first-degree murder, kidnapping and child sexual assault. He told reporters he had been with the 6-year-old when she died at Christmas a decade ago but that her death was an accident.

Wearing a short-sleeved red shirt and dark tie, Karr looked composed but nervous when he arrived at the Bangkok airport escorted by Thai police. He did not answer questions fired by the crowd of journalists who thronged around him.

In Los Angeles, he was to be led off the plane outside the view of waiting journalists.

Three Department of Homeland Security personnel accompanied the suspect but there were no other extraordinary security measures, Fox News reported. Karr, who was not handcuffed, chatted with his escorts in his business-class window seat and was given a metal knife and fork for his meal, it said.

It was not clear when he would be flown on to Boulder, Colorado, where investigators were waiting to question him.

Karr said last week he loved JonBenet and answered ''no'' when asked whether he was innocent. He did not say how she died.

The arrest was a surprise development in a case that 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.

JonBenet was found December 26, 1996, in the basement of her home in Boulder, strangled with a garrote made from a stick and cord and her skull fractured.

Her father discovered her body hours after the girl's mother stumbled on three-page letter claiming she had been kidnapped for a 118,000 dollars ransom.

JonBenet's mother died of cancer in June.

Casting doubt on Karr's confession, his ex-wife Lara told KGO-TV in San Francisco Karr had been with her in Alabama for the entire Christmas season that year and she did not believe he could have been involved in JonBenet's murder.

REUTERS LL BS1114