Sex game murderer released from jail
The only person convicted of killing British student Meredith Kercher in Italy is free, having been granted early release 14 years after the brutal murder that allegedly involved drug-fuelled sex games.
Ivorian Rudy Guede was convicted in 2008 for the murder the previous year that also saw Kercher’s American flatmate, Amanda Knox, jailed but then sensationally acquitted alongside her Italian boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito.
“Rudy Guede was released at the end of his sentence,” his lawyer Fabrizio Ballarini said.
He said a magistrate had granted early release and the order had been signed by the Milan prosecutor’s office.
The half-naked body of Kercher was found in November 2007 in a pool of blood in the cottage she shared with Knox in the town of Perugia, central Italy. The 21-year-old’s throat had been cut and she had been stabbed 47 times.
Guede, who was linked to the murder scene by DNA evidence, was arrested in Germany a few weeks later and, following a fast-track trial in Italy, was sentenced in October 2008 to 30 years for murder and sexual assault.
His sentence was reduced to 16 years on appeal, and he tried unsuccessfully to have it reviewed following the acquittals of Knox and Sollecito.
Knox, a 20-year-old student from Seattle at the time of the murder, served four years of a 26-year sentence before she was acquitted twice, first in 2011 then again in 2015 after a retrial.
She became the focus of frenzied media attention in Britain and the US over the trial, in which prosecutors painted the murder as a drugfuelled sex game gone awry.
Sollecito, who was 23 at the time of the killing and had only been dating Knox for a week, was also acquitted.