Meredith Kercher ‘killer’ Raffaele Sollecito arrested near Italian border

 
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Kiran Randhawa|Tom Kington21 February 2014
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One of Meredith Kercher’s alleged killers was today seized by police near the Italian border after his conviction for murdering the British student was reinstated.

Raffaele Sollecito — yesterday given a 25-year jail sentence for killing Miss Kercher in 2007 — was ordered to surrender his passport and banned from leaving the country after judges said there was a “real and actual danger” he could escape Italian justice.

The 29-year-old was apprehended at a hotel between Udine and Tarvisio, close to the borders of Austria and Slovenia. He was taken to the Udine police station, where officers confiscated his passport.

His lawyer, Luca Maori, said his client voluntarily went to police and that he was in the area because that is where his current girlfriend lives.

An Italian court yesterday reinstated guilty verdicts against Amanda Knox and Sollecito for the 2007 killing, overturning a successful 2011 appeal that freed them after four years in jail.

Knox was sentenced to 28 years and six months. She stayed in her native America for the trial and has said she will only be extradited to Italy “kicking and screaming”.

In her first interview since the verdict, she today fought back tears as she expressed disbelief. The 26-year-old, who watched proceedings on television at home in Seattle, told ABC’s Good Morning America: “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This really has hit me like a train. I did not expect this to happen. I really expected so much better from the Italian justice system.

“They found me innocent before, how can they find me guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?”

It came as Miss Kercher’s family, from Coulsdon, Surrey, told how they are still waiting for the truth.

At a Florence press conference today, Miss Kercher’s sister Stephanie said: “We are still on a journey for the truth and it may be the fact that we don’t ever really know what happened that night.

“But the verdict has been upheld this time so we hope that ... we are nearer the end so that we can just start to remember Meredith for who she was and draw a line under it, as it were.” Giovanni Belmonte, the cabinet chief of the Udine police station, said police found Sollecito with his girlfriend Greta Menegaldo at a hotel in Venzone at around 1am today. Miss Menegaldo is believed to live in Tarvisio, near where they were found.

Miss Kercher, a Leeds University exchange student, was found with her throat slashed in the bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, central Italy, in November 2007.

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