Amanda Knox should be convicted of murdering British student Meredith Kercher, whose tragic death was in danger of being overlooked, an Italian appeal court has been told.

Prosecutor Francesco Maresca, in his closing arguments in the third trial of Knox and co-defendant and former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, urged the panel of two professional judges and eight lay jurors to disregard Knox’s claims of innocence and her criticism of Italy’s judicial system as “failed, or fallible”.

“She has become a well-known person. You know she signed contracts for millions of dollars for her book. She has someone who takes care of her public relations. She has a personal website where she invites people to collect donations in the memory of the victim, Meredith Kercher, which is an unbearable contradiction for the family,” Maresca said.

He said the world’s attention has focused on Knox, while “the victim has fallen into total oblivion, to the immense pain of the Kercher family”.

Kercher, 21, killed in November 2007 in the apartment she shared with Knox . Her throat had been cut and her body left beneath a blanket in her bedroom. Prosecutors claim Knox and Sollecito carried out the murder with a third man, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, who is serving a 16-year sentence.

The case was being tried for a third time after Italy’s highest court annulled a 2011 appellate court ruling throwing out their initial murder convictions. The high court’s scathing opinion tore apart the lower court’s decision to free the pair as full of errors and contradictions.