NEW details about
a sex game that allegedly led to the murder of Meredith Kercher,
the British exchange student, have been revealed by an Italian prosecutor.
Giuliano Mignini,
the official leading the case, alleges that Amanda Knox, Kerchers
American housemate, instigated the erotic game and probably persuaded
an accomplice into softening up the 21-year-old Briton.
Reconstructing
the students final moments, Mignini alleges that
Kerchers killers became incensed and
violent after she resisted their advances.
Knox, 21, an
exchange student from Seattle and her Italian
ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, 24, went on trial
last Friday accused of sexually abusing and murdering Kercher
in the Umbrian town of Perugia.
They both say they are innocent.
Rudy Guede, 21, a drifter from the Ivory Coast, has already been
jailed for 30 years for his part in the killing.
Mignini gave his account of the
murder at committal hearings which were closed to the public. However, details
of his reconstruction will appear in a book called Meredith: Lights and Shadows
in Perugia. It
is written by Vincenzo Maria Mastronardi, a forensic
psychiatrist, and Giuseppe Castellini, editor of the Giornale dell Umbria
newspaper, and will be published this week.
Mignini said Kercher,
from Coulsdon, Surrey,
was likely to have been irritated with Knox for allegedly bringing Sollecito and Guede to the
cottage the young women shared late on the night of the murder in November
2007.
Knox, whom Guede was always trying to please, probably pushed him into
softening up the English girl and preparing her for the erotic
game . . . while Knox dedicated herself to Sollecito, said Mignini.
And when Guede failed because of energetic resistance by the victim,
the three became incensed and violent.
They grabbed
Kercher by the neck and tried to strangle her. Sollecito grabbed her violently in the back and on a
breast, deforming her bra clasp and then they finished her off with the violent
knife stab to the left part of the neck. Kercher gave
a last desperate scream, which was heard by [a neighbour].
The prosecutor
said that just before the final blow, Kercher
suffered a cut to the right hand as she tried to free herself and pushed away
the knife which Knox allegedly held.
A minute after
the last stab wound, the three allegedly fled the cottage, with Knox and Sollecito returning later to stage a fake robbery by
breaking a window, said Mignini.
The prosecutor
singled out the placing of a duvet over Kerchers
body as extremely important from a psychological point of view. He
argued it indicated pity and respect for the victim: Amanda, especially as
a woman, couldnt bear
that naked, torn female cadaver.
Both Knox and Sollecito insist they were at his home on the night of the
murder. Their defence teams
dispute DNA evidence linking Knox to a knife, which investigators say may be
the murder weapon, and Sollecito to Kerchers bra clasp.
Last week Knox
told her lawyer Luciano Ghirga:
At last the hour of truth has arrived. Im not
afraid. I hope that the whole truth will come out because Ive always been a friend of Merediths and I didnt kill her.
However, Mignini alleges that on the morning after the murder Knox
tried to delay the bodys discovery by telling other housemates that it was
normal for Kerchers bedroom to be locked.
When the door was
kicked down, Knox and Sollecito were too far away to
see into the room, where Kerchers half-naked
body lay on the floor under a beige duvet, according to witnesses quoted by Mignini at the committal hearings last October.
When those
present go outside after the body is found, Knox and Sollecito
are also outside, intent on kissing and caressing each other, as they did
subsequently during police searches.
A very
strange way of behaving which started the very moment the victims body was
found . . . and at a time when all the other young people were literally
overwhelmed by that discovery, said Mignini.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article5537365.ece