Italian prosecutor demands life term for American student

Italian prosecutors demanded US student Amanda Knox’s lifelong imprisonment for the 2007 murder of a British university housemate, at an appeal hearing yesterday.

Prosecutor Manuela Comodi also insisted that 24-year-old Knox’s former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 27, should spend the rest of his life in jail for the gruesome murder of Meredith Kercher in the house she and Knox shared in the university town of Perugia.

Knox and Sollecito were sentenced to 26 and 25 years in prison respectively in 2009, but both maintain they are innocent and have taken the case on appeal.

Comodi said the pair should receive tougher sentences, citing aggravating circumstances such as the lack of a motive for the murder.

A third person, Rudy Guede, has also been sentenced for the killing and is serving a 16-year sentence after exhausting his chances for appeal.

Guede also says he is innocent of the murder, although he admits to having been in the house at the time of the killing, as shown by DNA evidence.

Prosecutors say Knox slashed Kercher while Sollecito and Guede held her down in a drug-fuelled sexual assault that shocked Italy.

Tabloid coverage of the trial has focussed on Knox, who has been portrayed alternatively as an American naif abroad or a brooding, dark character.

After an independent forensic review commissioned by the appeal court cast doubt on some of the DNA evidence used to convict Knox and Sollecito, prosecutors concentrated their final arguments on other evidence.

Comodi said there were “traces of Amanda’s DNA mixed with Meredith’s blood in the bathroom, Sollecito’s bloody footprint on a carpet and traces on Amanda and Raffaele in a corridor that point to their presence in the house.”

But Sollecito’s defence lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno, said the DNA review pointed clearly to her client’s innocence.

“This trial was based exclusively on so-called scientific proof ...The review was very precise,” she told reporters at the hearing.

“Maximum trust was put in DNA that should have been thrown away and declared unusable. If we continue, we are going against the evidence,” she added.