The boyfriend who wouldn’t kill a fly

When Raffaele Sollecito, an IT undergraduate from a middle-class family, fell for the young American Amanda Knox, it changed his life forever.

Originally from Bari in southern Italy, Sollecito, the son of a respected urologist, first encountered Knox at a concert not long after she arrived in Perugia.

His initial impression of the Seattle-born foreign exchange student was that she was “interesting”. The pair quickly started a relationship and acquaintances said the Italian lavished attention on his new girlfriend.

The couple sometimes smoked marijuana together and Sollecito – whose sister was a police officer – claimed he was smoking the drug and downloading a cartoon at his house on the night Meredith Kercher was murdered.

But prosecutors said his DNA was found on the British student’s bra strap, which linked him to the crime. He was arrested on 6 November, 2007 – four days after Ms Kercher’s body was found – and he was behind bars from then until last night.

His alibi was thrown into doubt when police chief Filippo Bartolozzi told the court during the original trial that an inspection of his computer showed no activity on it between 9:10pm on 1 November, 2007 and 5:32am on 2 November.

It was some time between these hours that Miss Kercher is thought to have been killed.

The Italian protested his innocence throughout and, on the first day of evidence in February, he stood up and told the court he found it hard to kill a fly.

He was not a violent person, he said, and claimed he had been the victim of a “judicial error”.