Clues implicating Amanda Knox ‘were underestimated’ by judges

Amanda Knox served two years in prison (AP)

Italy’s supreme court has declared that clues that implicated Amanda Knox in the killing of British student Meredith Kercher had been underestimated by the judges who quashed her conviction for the crime and freed her from prison in 2011.

The Court of Cassation, sitting in Rome, has released the detailed reasoning behind its controversial decision on 25 March to quash the acquittals of both Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the November 2007 murder.

The decision forced a new appeals trial, likely to start next year in Florence.

The court said the possibility that the pair had been involved in a sex game that went wrong had not been taken seriously enough.

It also criticised the “numerous inconsistencies, contradictions and manifest lack of logic” in the Perugia appeal court’s reasoning when it absolved the pair of the killing,

Drifter Rudy Guede, was convicted of the slaying in a separate trial; and is serving a 16-year sentence. The Cassation court judges said that it had to be recognised “that he [Guede] was not the sole author” of the crime.

Knox, now 25, and Sollecito, now 29, who were both students along with Kercher, served two years in prison before their convictions were overturned in 2011.