Appeal Trial of Amanda Knox Opens in Italy

Source: The New York Times

PERUGIA, Italy — The appeal trial of Amanda Knox, convicted two years ago in the killing of a British exchange student, opened Monday with an Ivorian man, also convicted in the 2007 murder, telling a packed courtroom that Ms. Knox and her ex-boyfriend had committed the crime.

“It is absolutely true,” the Ivorian man, Rudy Hermann Guede, testified while a pale Ms. Knox and her Italian co-defendant, Raffaele Sollecito, looked on from a few feet away. “It is not up to me to decide who killed Meredith, but I have always said who was there in that house that cursed night.”

Shortly after Mr. Guede, 24, was led out by guards, Ms. Knox told the judges and jury in a shaky voice that she was “shocked and anguished” by the testimony. “He knows we weren’t there and had nothing to do with it,” she said.

The murder trial and retrial of Ms. Knox, a 24-year-old American from Seattle, has attracted international attention because of its lurid details and the differing portraits of the defendant, who has been alternately described as a hard-working college student caught up in an arcane foreign justice system and a pot-smoking criminal.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/28/world/europe/28knox.html