Raffaele Sollecito: ‘I’m unsure where Amanda Knox was that night’

September 16th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Mr Sollecito, a computer studies graduate, chastises himself for having smoked so much marijuana that he could not give detectives a clear account of what he and his new girlfriend had been doing the night before.

“My poor memory seemed a ridiculous reason to throw me into an isolation cell and accuse me of involvement in the crime,” he writes in the book, to be published by Simon Schuster in the US on Tuesday.

“If the problem was with Amanda and the things she might or might not have done outside the house – assuming she left at all – why not focus the investigation on her?

“Maybe she knew something. Maybe there was something she hadn’t told me. But please, I thought, leave me out of it.”

Mr Sollecito goes on to insist that he “didn’t believe for an instant she was capable of murder”, but admits he had doubts about the friends that Miss Knox mixed with. Among her acquaintances was Rudy Guede, a local drifter and small-time drug dealer from the Ivory Coast, who is serving a 16-year jail sentence after being convicted of the murder of Miss Kercher in a separate trial.

The admission goes to the heart of one of the key points of the prosecution – that the couple could not give a convincing explanation of where they were that night and what they were doing.

Mr Sollecito acknowledges in the book that they had “no real alibi the night of November 1 except each other.” He and Miss Knox were found guilty of sexual assault and murder at a trial in 2009 and sentenced to 25 years and 26 years respectively. But they had their convictions overturned after a judge and jury ruled that the proof against them was insufficient and the DNA evidence contaminated.

The book reveals Mr Sollecito’s ambivalent and shifting relationship with Miss Knox, who was an undergraduate at the University of Washington in her home town of Seattle when she came to Perugia to study for a year.

At first, Mr Sollecito, from Bari in southern Italy, was clearly smitten with the vivacious American, whose teenage nickname of Foxy Knoxy came to haunt her as police and prosecutors became convinced that the murder was the result of a sex game gone wrong.

Four years later, however, after his acquittal and release from jail, his feelings for her had radically altered. As he planned to fly to Seattle for a reunion with Miss Knox last Christmas, the prospect of meeting her again “felt like a step back into the lion’s den.”

“I wasn’t just nervous about setting eyes on her again,” he writes. “I felt I was suffering from some sort of associative disorder, in which it became difficult for me to focus on my genuine and continuing fondness for Amanda without being overwhelmed by an instinctive, involuntary revulsion at everything the courts and the media had thrown at her.”

Two competing recollections of Miss Knox jostled in his mind – “the real one, and the distorted, she-devil version I had read about and seen on television nonstop for four years”.

They never did get back together, despite all the messages and presents exchanged in prison. Mr Sollecito has resumed his advanced computer science studies at Verona university and will this week promote his book in the US. In it, he complains bitterly about how the two of them were demonised by the police in the days and weeks after their arrest.

Miss Knox was portrayed as sex-obsessed after she candidly answered detective’s questions about her previous sexual partners and police found sex aids in her wash bag.

Mr Sollecito claims the Perugia police tried to turn him against his lover, telling him he had “lost his head” for a woman of loose morals.

His family also joined the “anti-Amanda chorus”, urging him to stop vouching for her with his statements, but he ignored them.

Attempts by police to depict him as a drug and pornography addict with a sinister interest in collecting knives were gross distortions of trivial elements of his life, he writes.

Investigators seized on his enthusiasm for Japanese manga comics as evidence of a violent nature, as they pieced together a lurid scenario – ultimately thrown out by the appeal court – in which he stabbed Miss Kercher in the neck during a drug-fuelled sex attack.

Mr Sollecito, whose father was a doctor and came from a well-to-family, describes his prison in Umbria as “like some weirdly dysfunctional high school”, with rival clans and cliques: transsexuals, paedophiles, North Africans and Italians who stuck together by region.

He also relives the dramatic moment, at the end of their appeal in the medieval, frescoed courtroom in Perugia, when the judge announced that their convictions had been overturned. As he put it: “Our Italian adventure, one part love affair to 99 parts nightmare, was over at last,” he wrote.

When they stopped at a motorway service station on the way home he asked at first for a Corona beer, but then realised what he really wanted was a Chupa Chups – a popular brand of children’s lollipop. As he put it: “I realised I wanted something else, something to remind me of my childhood.”

Summing up his ordeal, he says: “Neither Amanda Knox or I had anything to do with the crime but we came perilously close to spending the rest of our lives in prison because the authorities found it easier, and more convenient, to take advantage of our youth and inexperience than to mount a proper investigation.”

The publication of Mr Sollecito’s book is not the last word on the affair, however. Next March the Supreme Court in Italy will hear a prosecutor’s appeal in the case, and Miss Knox is also writing her own account, having signed a book deal thought to be worth £2.5 million.