Meridian’s Dave Holloway — father of missing teen Natalee Holloway, who hasn’t been seen since her high school trip to Aruba in May 2005 — says a private investigator will once again be on the island to search for his missing daughter.

Holloway said Sunday that tracker dog specialist Fred Golba, from Chicopee, Massachusetts, will begin his latest search for evidence into Natalee Holloway’s disappearance early today. The focus of the new search: a retention pond, one that has been searched before with no evidence found.

Golba, who has searched for her eight times before, must be accompanied to the pond by Aruban police escorts, who delayed an anticipated weekend search.

Holloway said a witness last year alleged that he saw the only remaining suspect, Joran van der Sloot, coming out of the brackish pond in northwest Aruba with only one sneaker on after Natalee’s disappearance. He said the witness has passed a polygraph test.

“I’ve been looking for (nearly) four years and I intend to search all the evidence and every lead,” Holloway said Sunday from his home in Meridian. “(The witness) saw what he saw – or he believed he saw what he saw.”

Holloway, who has tirelessly searched for his daughter for nearly four years, refuses to give up on the search until Natalee’s found.

Holloway had planned to wait until the pond dried up “but the weather has not been cooperative,” he said.

Natalee, from Mountain Brook, Ala., was 18 when she was last seen leaving a bar in the Aruban capital on the final night of a high school graduation trip. No trace of her has been found despite extensive searches involving hundreds of volunteers, Aruban soldiers, FBI agents and even Dutch F-16 jets with special equipment.

Ann Angela, a spokeswoman for the Aruba Prosecutors’ Office, said neither police nor prosecutors have any new information in the case, but they gave Dave Holloway permission to search the pond, which is about a kilometer (mile) away from where she was last seen.

Before he left for Aruba on Friday, Golba told Fox 25 television in Boston that he planned to stick his hands into the pond’s muddy bottom and feel around for “bones and his sneaker” while his tracking dog searches the marshy scrubland.

“I have more confidence in this pond then anything I have done in eight trips to this island,” Golba told the TV station.

In early January, Chief Prosecutor Hans Mos said his office was “approaching the end of this lengthy investigation” and appealed to the public for help.



David McFadden of the Associated Press contributed to this report.