Meredith Kercher murder was sex game gone wrong, court rules as it orders new trial for Amanda Knox

 
Amanda Knox: served four years of a 26-year sentence before the murder conviction was overturned
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Kiran Randhawa19 June 2013

Amanda Knox will have to face a retrial in the death of Meredith Kercher because Italian prosecutors believe she died in a “sex game gone wrong”.

Judges said the acquittal of Amanda Knox by the appeals court for the murder of her roommate was full of “deficiencies, contradictions and illogical” conclusions.

In March, the Court of Cassation ordered a new trial and yesterday released a 74-page document outlining its reasoning.

It indicates that the judges support the prosecutors’ original theory that Miss Kercher, from Coulsdon, Surrey, possibly died during a forced “erotic game” that got violent.

It added the appeal had to be annulled “due to the multiple shortcomings, contradictory events and manifest lack of logical reasoning.”

Miss Kercher’s body was found in November 2007 in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, a central Italian town popular with foreign exchange students.

Knox, now 25, and her Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 29, were initially convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, but a Perugia appeals court acquitted them in 2011, criticising virtually the entire case mounted by prosecutors.

A man from Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the killing in a separate proceeding and is serving a 16-year sentence.

In the Cassation ruling, the high court judges said they “had to recognise that he (Guede) was not the sole author” of the crime.

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