Amanda Knox on Friday criticised on X
a sentence by an appeals court in Florence, convicting her of
calumny for accusing Patrick Lumumba in relation to the 2007
murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia.
"I was unequivocally not at home when Meredith was killed, I was
not involved and I don't know anything more than can be deduced
from the evidence", said Knox after the motivation of the
sentence was published by the appeals court.
"Don't worry: I will be back", she wrote, saying she would
appeal the conviction to Italy's supreme Cassation Court to
"fight this thing".
The appeals court in June confirmed a conviction against Knox in
the calumny case.
According to the motivation of the sentence issued by the
Florence appeals court, Knox "unjustly" accused Lumumba, who was
innocent, of Kercher's murder to "get out of the difficult
situation in which she had found herself".
The judges believe that Knox "was inside the house when the
murder took place and thus knew well" that he "wasn't there",
the motivation noted.
The case concerned a three-year-term, which Knox has already
served, for fingering former bar owner Lumumba in relation to
the murder.
Knox initially identified Congo-born Lumumba over the November
1, 2007 murder in the Umbrian city of the 21-year-old British
exchange student, a crime for which the American was first
convicted with her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, and
finally acquitted after almost four years in jail.
The 36-year-old writer filed the appeal to definitively annul
the calumny sentence on the basis of a European Court of Human
Rights ruling that her defence rights were violated during the
initial investigation.
Last October, the Cassation overturned the conviction and
ordered a retrial.
Knox and Sollecito were arrested five days after the murder and
convicted by a court of first instance, but this conviction was
subsequently overturned.
The appeal sentence was then thrown out by the Cassation, which
ordered a new trial on appeal leading to their re-conviction in
2014.
Knox and Sollecito were eventually acquitted definitively by the
supreme court the following year.
Rudy Guede, an Ivorian, was convicted and sentenced to 16 years
for the murder.
He was released from prison in November 2021 after serving 13
years.
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