ROME
Italian
prosecutors on Tuesday asked for a 30-year prison sentence for former
US student Amanda Knox at a retrial where she is being judged in
absentia for the murder of her housemate, Italian media reported.
Prosecutors
at the trial also requested that her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito be
given 26 years, saying the punishment should be harsher for Knox
because she initially accused someone else of the crime.
Knox
and Sollecito have already served four years in prison for the murder
of British student Meredith Kercher, who was found half-naked in a pool
of blood on November 2, 2007 in the house she shared with Knox
.
.
The
pair, who have always protested their innocence, were acquitted on
appeal in 2011 but the supreme court earlier this year overturned that
ruling, sending the case back to the appeals stage at a court in
Florence.
The retrial is expected to reach a verdict in January.
Knox
is now back in the United States and experts say it is highly unlikely
that she could ever be extradited even if she is convicted and even if
that conviction is upheld in another appeal to the supreme court.
Rudy
Guede, a local petty thief and drug dealer, has been convicted
separately and is serving a 16-year sentence for the gruesome murder
which shocked the university town of Perugia and has divided opinions.
Prosecutor
Alessandro Crini told the court on Tuesday that the DNA evidence, which
is highly disputed in the case, showed that Sollecito and Knox had
stabbed Kercher while Guede sexually assaulted her.
Crini
said he believed Knox had used a large kitchen knife that was later
found by investigators in Sollecito's home, pointing to faint DNA traces
of Kercher found on the blade and of Knox on the handle.
He
said the sexual element became "marginal" as the drug-fuelled violence
increased. "They were trying to get rid of someone who had to be shut
up," Crini said.
Knox during one interrogation accused
Patrick Lumumba, the owner of a bar where she worked as a waitress, of
being in the house at the time of the murder.
But Crini said a phone wiretap had overheard Knox telling her mother that Lumumba was not there.
"What
gave her the certainty if not the fact that she was there?" Crini
asked, saying that the young woman's version of what happened had
"little credibility".
Crini said Knox claimed she had
returned to the house after sleeping at Sollecito's when Kercher was
already dead but claimed she had not noticed anything and even showered
in a bathroom dirty with Kercher's blood.
He also said
Knox's initial and later retracted statement to police that she had
heard "a scream and violence" in the house "contained elements of
truth".
"Where do these elements come from if not having been directly involved in the incident?" he said.
Crini
also said that Sollecito's claim that he spent most of the evening at
home on his computer was not backed up by analysis of the computer
.
.
Criticising
the previous appeals court ruling that acquitted Knox and Sollecito,
Crini said it had made the mistake of "isolating" individual pieces of
evidence without looking at the full picture.
The supreme court had "wiped out" that ruling, he said.
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