I want to go back to university, says Knox

THE father of Amanda Knox has said she would like to go back to university and finish her degree, but that he worries about what four years in prison have done to his daughter.

Speaking after Ms Knox, 24, arrived back in the US having been cleared of murdering the British student Meredith Kercher in the house they shared in the Italian town of Perugia, Curt Ms Knox said: “What’s the trauma… and when will it show up, if it even shows up?

She’s a very strong girl, but it’s been a tough time for her. She pretty much squished the air out of us when she hugged us,” he said in front of his home in West Seattle.

“The focus simply is Amanda’s well-being and getting her re- associated with just being a regular person again,”

He added there are no immediate plans for her to undergo counselling.

Ms Knox’s life turned around dramatically on Monday when an Italian appeals court threw out her conviction in the sexual assault and fatal stabbing of her British roommate.

She was overcome with emotion yesterday as she returned to Seattle for the first time. “Thank you for being there for me,” Ms Knox tearfully told her supporters.

“I’m really overwhelmed right now,” she said, minutes after she was escorted off a British Airways flight from London. “I was looking down from the airplane, and it seemed like everything wasn’t real.”

Ms Knox sobbed and held her mother’s hand as her lawyer Theodore Simon said her acquittal “unmistakably announced to the world” that she was not responsible for the killing of Ms Kercher.

After her parents offered their thanks to lawyers and supporters, Ms Knox spoke briefly, saying, “They’re reminding me to speak in English, because I’m having problems with that.

“Thank you to everyone who’s believed in me, who’s defended me, who’s supported my family.

“My family’s the most important thing to me so I just want to go and be with them, so, thank you for being there for me,” she said before she and her family left.

Ms Kercher’s family said they are now back to “square one”.

Monday’s decision “obviously raises further questions,” her brother Lyle Kercher said.

“If those two are not the guilty parties, then who are the guilty people?” he said.

In a letter released hours before she left Italy, Ms Knox thanked those Italians who supported her. “Those who wrote, those who defended me, those who were close, those who prayed for me,” she wrote, “I love you.”