Amanda Knox retrial: mafia gangster claims brother was killer
Retrial for murder of Meredith Kercher hears gangster say her dead brother killed Briton during burglary gone wrong
Tom Kington in Rome
The Guardian, Friday 4 October 2013 12.28 BST
Meredith Kercher, who was murdered in Perugia, Italy, in 2007. Photograph: Kercher Family/PA
The new trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito for the murder of the British student Meredith Kercher took a surreal turn on Friday when a convicted mafia gangster told a court that her brother was responsible for the death in 2007.
Lucia Aviello, who first made her claims in court in 2011, said: "I totally confirm the accusations against my brother Antonio, who is guilty. It wasn't Amanda or Raffaele. I am proud that two innocent kids have left prison."
The American student Knox, 26, and her former boyfriend Sollecito, 29, were convicted and jailed in 2009 for Kercher's killing in Perugia, before being released when they were cleared on appeal in 2011. The appeal was then overturned by Italy's supreme court this year.
They are now back on trial in Florence with the hearing due to last until Christmas, before the case returns to the supreme court.
Aviello – a convicted member of the Neapolitan mafia who was formerly called Luciano but is undergoing a sex change – is currently in jail. She claimed her brother was one of the real killers of Kercher in letters sent to investigators in 2007.
Aviello said her brother Antonio, who has since died, had taken part in a burglary of the house Kercher shared with Knox, and that Antonio had stabbed Kercher when she started screaming. In court on Friday she said the burglars had been commissioned to steal artwork.
She has previously claimed she knew where the murder weapon and Kercher's keys were hidden, because she had been given them by her brother to hide. Believing she lacked credibility, Perugia police did not make a search.
Aviello retracted her claims in July 2011, but on Friday she told the court she was now standing by her original testimony.
In June 2011 a fellow inmate of Aviello's called by the prosecution said Aviello had told him she had been offered €70,000 (£59,000) by Giulia Bongiorno, one of Sollecito's lawyers, to invent the story.
Cosimo Zaccari, who was then in jail for fraud, libel, criminal conspiracy and receiving stolen goods, told the court Aviello had confided in him that "I was contacted to create confusion in the trial".
Alexander Ilicet, who shared a cell with Aviello, also testified, stating that Aviello had boasted of being offered €158,000 by Bongiorno, which Aviello planned to use for a sex change. In court on Friday, Aviello denied she had been paid to make her claims.
Officially, Aviello was asked by the prosecutor to take the stand on Friday because she had not been allowed to repeat her 2011 retraction in court, a point made by Italy's supreme court in its ruling to overturn Knox and Sollecito's appeal.
As such, her evidence on Friday was considered a formality, rather than a real part of the new trial, the judge, Alessandro Nencini, said at the trial's first hearing on Monday. Bongiorno called the appearance irrelevant.
But the prosecutor Alessandro Crini said on Monday he was interested in asking Aviello if she had been "convinced" to speak up. Francesco Sollecito, Raffaele Sollecito's father, has dismissed the accusation that he or Bongiorno paid Aviello off as laughable.
On Friday, Nencini called Aviello's testimony "one of the mysteries" of the Kercher case. He also appointed police experts who carried out DNA tests on a knife suspected of being the murder weapon, on which other traces have already been found and attributed by prosecutors to Knox and Kercher.
A new trace which will be analysed was only discovered by appeal-court-appointed experts and never tested. The next hearing in the trial will be held on 6 November.
