AFP
Rome
Amanda Knox’s ex-lover Raffaele Sollecito said yesterday that his acquittal for the grisly murder of a British student was like being “reborn”, but being branded a murderer had inflicted permanent emotional damage.
“It was like being reborn, it was the start of a new life,” Sollecito told journalists at a press conference in Rome after his Friday acquittal of killing Meredith Kercher, who was stabbed to death in the university town of Perugia in 2007.
Sollecito said he felt like “somebody who had been kidnapped and then freed after seven years and five months”.
The Italian insisted that his relationship with Knox had been a purely romantic one, and vowed to sue anyone who called him a murder accomplice again.
The 31-year old said that he had spoken to Knox, 27, but did not have any plans to meet her again.
The Italian was twice convicted for helping Knox kill Kercher, who was found dead in the house she shared with the Seattle native.
Italy’s top court eventually threw out the case because blunders in the police investigation and earlier trials meant it was impossible to prove the former couple were at the crime scene when Kercher died.
The Italian, who was 23 at the time of the slaying, had only been dating Knox for a week when Kercher was killed.
Even so, prosecutors had used pictures that showed the young couple cuddling to claim he had killed Kercher for love.
Yesterday Sollecito said that his relationship with Knox was just a tale of “affection between two young adolescents”.
“I’ve spoken to Amanda. Obviously we’re both very happy. It was a short telephone call in which I wished her the best for the future,” Sollecito said. “I don’t have any plans to see her, I don’t know if it will ever happen, I’m not anxious to.”
Sollecito and Knox are both dating other people now, with the Seattle native reportedly engaged to musician Colin Sutherland, a childhood friend.
But Sollecito said the four years he spent in prison left “a deep wound ... which will never heal”, and described being wrongly convicted as “an infernal tragedy”.
He also said he suffered “a dreadful kind of endless pain” since his arrest.
Early in their investigation, prosecutors believed that Kercher had been killed in a satanic ritual.
The arrest of US citizen Knox quickly drew global coverage, throwing Sollecito and his family into the spotlight.
Then police arrested Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede after his DNA was found on Kercher’s body. He is the only one still serving time.
Forensic experts insisted a lack of defence wounds on the student’s body suggested more than one person killed Kercher.
Knox and Sollecito quickly topped the list of suspected accomplices.
Prosecutors said that Knox, Sollecito and Guede had tried to force the British student to take part in an orgy.
The Italian media has depicted Sollecito, a computer engineering student at the time, as an oddball loner who collected knives with a passion for violent Japanese manga.
Reports also claimed Sollecito’s family offered to pay a man he met in jail for a sex change, if he agreed to testify his own brother had murdered Kercher.
The “spite and hate” his family attracted was one of the more painful elements of the saga, Sollecito said.
“I always believed I would be found innocent. I don’t know if I can say that the Italian justice system worked, if I think about what I’ve been through,” he said. “The wound will never stop bleeding.”