‘All clues point to Knox’ – prosecutors

“All clues” point to Amanda Knox’s guilt in the murder of Meredith Kercher, prosecutors said yesterday as they urged jurors in her appeal to consider the victim’s family.

Making his closing speech, prosecutor Giancarlo Costagliola denounced an “obsessive media campaign” for stoking sympathy for American Knox.

The 24-year-old was sentenced in 2009 to 26 years in prison for killing the British student, along with her Italian ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 26, who was jailed for 25 years.

But media coverage has made “everyone feel like the parents of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito”, Mr Costagliola said as their appeal process entered its final stage. Addressing a packed courtroom in the Italian town of Perugia, where the murder took place four years ago, he said: “As you make your decision, I wish that you jurors feel a little bit like the parents of Meredith Kercher, a serious, studious girl whose life was taken by these two kids from good families.”

University of Leeds student Miss Kercher, from Coulsdon in Surrey, was found dead on 2 November, 2007 in her bedroom at the house in the Umbrian hilltop town she shared with Knox and others.

Her throat had been slit and her semi-naked body was partially covered by a duvet.

Prosecutors claimed Knox, from Seattle, and Sollecito, from the southern Italian city of Bari, killed her in a bungled sex game.

Both have strenuously protested their innocence from behind bars. Summing up the clues he claimed pointed to their guilt, Mr Costagliola listed bloody footprints found in the house that are compatible with those of the defendants.