All evidence points to a sole killer in the sex murder of British student Meredith Kercher, excluding accused Amanda Knox of the US and her Italian boyfriend, a top defense lawyer said on Monday.
The scene of the crime was “teeming with traces” of Rudy Guede, a day laborer from Ivory Coast convicted separately for the 2007 slaying, said Giulia Bongiorno in her summing up, with a verdict in the sensational case just days away.
Focusing on a trace allegedly left by Knox’s then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito — some DNA on a hook of the victim’s bra — Bongiorno cast doubt on the forensic analysis.
“How can you touch the hook without touching the cloth?” she said.
Bongiorno also said that Sollecito, now 25, “raised the alarm and waited for the investigators on the doorstep of the house of the crime,” asking: “Would a killer do that?”
Sollecito and Knox, 22, have been held since a few days after the slaying of the 21-year-old exchange student from Coulsdon, England, on Nov. 1, 2007.
Kercher was found semi-nude in a pool of blood with her throat cut in the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, a university town in central Italy.
Bongiorno said the prosecution failed to establish any link between Sollecito and Guede, who was sentenced to 30 years in jail in a “fast-track” trial limited to evidence from the probe.
“There is not a story involving Rudy, Amanda and Raffaele,” Bongiorno said. “There are two stories, one is Rudy’s and the other is Amanda and Raffaele’s ... which is a banal one of two people in the early stages of a romance.”
“They were not a couple looking for parties, orgies or sex games, not with Meredith or anyone else,” she added.
The prosecution is seeking life terms for both Knox and Sollecito. Lawyers for Knox planned to present their final arguments on yesterday and today.
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