Italian Supreme Court rules Meredith Kercher murder was a sex game gone wrong and orders Amanda Knox back for trial



Bad news: Amanda Knox has called the reversal by the Cassation 'painful' but said she is confident she would be exonerated

Italy's high court today faulted the acquittal of Amanda Knox by the appeals court for the murder of her roommate, ruling that it WAS a 'sex game gone wrong' and ordered her back for trial.



The Supreme Court said the ruling was full of 'deficiencies, contradictions and illogical' conclusions and ordered the new appeals court to look at all the evidence to determine whether Knox helped kill the teen.



In March, the Court of Cassation overturned Knox's acquittal in the 2007 murder of flatmate Meredith Kercher and ordered a new trial.



On Tuesday, the high court issued its written reasoning for doing so. Kercher's body was found in November 2007 in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, a central Italian town popular with foreign exchange students.



Knox, now 25, and her Italian ex-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, 29, were initially convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, but a Perugia appeals court acquitted them in 2011, criticizing virtually the entire case mounted by prosecutors.



The appellate court noted that the murder weapon was never found, said that DNA tests were faulty and that prosecutors provided no murder motive.



A young man from Ivory Coast, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the slaying in a separate proceeding and is serving a 16-year sentence.



In the 74-page Cassation ruling, the high court judges said they 'had to recognize that he (Guede) was not the sole author' of the crime, Italian news agency LaPresse reported. The judges though said he was the 'main protagonist'.

They said the new appeal process would serve to 'not only demonstrate the presence of the two suspects in the place of the crime, but to possibly outline the subjective position of Guede's accomplices'.



It said hypotheses ran from a simple case of forced sex involving Kercher 'to a group erotic game that blew up and got out of control'.

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Innocent: Knox left Italy a free woman after her 2011 acquittal, after serving nearly four years of a 26-year prison sentence

The high court faulted the Perugia appeals court for 'multiple instances of deficiencies, contradictions and illogical' conclusions.



The new court must conduct a full examination of evidence to resolve the ambiguities, it said.



Knox left Italy a free woman after her 2011 acquittal, after serving nearly four years of a 26-year prison sentence.



Now a University of Washington student in Seattle, she has called the reversal by the Cassation 'painful' but said she was confident she would be exonerated.



Italian law cannot compel Knox to return for the new trial and her lawyers have said she has no plans to do so. It is unclear what would happen to Knox if a possible conviction from the new trial is upheld on final appeal.



No date for the new trial has been set. Florence's appeals court was chosen since Perugia only has one appellate court.



Knox and Sollecito denied wrongdoing and said they weren't even in the apartment that night, although they acknowledged they had smoked marijuana and their memories were clouded.

Last month Knox said the future was very unsure for her financially and that she is almost broke because of her huge legal bills - despite a $1.5million book advance.

She will be paid a reported $4million in total for her memoir Waiting To Be Heard but claimed that her retrial and a potential libel lawsuits will leave her penniless.

Publicity drive: Amanda Knox appears on GMA earlier this month to promote her memoir

Knox also revealed that to make money in the future she will be writing more books and will be taking a creative writing course at the University of Washington, near her home in Seattle.



The prospect will inevitably cause further anguish to the family of Meredith Kercher, 21, the British student and her former roommate who she was accused of killing in 2007 in Perugia, Italy.

They are already angry at the string of interviews Knox has given to promote the book in which she has tried to portray herself as a victim of a gross injustice.

Speaking to the Toronto Post last month she said that she is scared and uncertain how she will get by in the years to come.

Knox, 25, said: ‘I don’t know what I am going to do. The future is very unsure for me financially.’

Her book could trigger a wave of costly libel lawsuits from police and prosecutors in Italy who she claims framed her, but Knox was unrepentant.

Freedom: Amanda Knox cries in court in 2011 following the verdict that overturns her conviction and acquits her of murdering her British room-mate Meredith Kercher

She said: ‘People asked me if I would change the book and I said absolutely not.

‘I am not going to change my story just because someone is threatening to sue me but I mean it sucks. It sucks and it sucks.’

Knox did not elaborate on what kind writing she will undertake in the future but said that it was ‘crushing’ to read the book by Miss Kercher’s father John in which he called on her to ‘come clean’.

Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito were initially found guilty for the murder of Miss Kercher but were acquitted in 2011.

In the latest of many twists in the case, the Italian Supreme Court ruled in March that both Knox and Sollecito will face a retrial.

Revealing: Knox and her former boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito (pictured shortly after Meredith Kercher's murder) have both written books about their time in jail

Brutal death: Meredith Kercher, 21, was killed in 2007 in Perugia, Italy

In an interview this week, Sollecito said that the prospect did not bother him and hinted that like Knox he might not return to Italy and face a possible jail term if found guilty again.

He said: ‘It’s something like a very far-away thought in my mind. I already know that I'm innocent and we already have proved it. So for me, it's kind of nonsense.”