FLORENCE, Italy — Police have found Amanda Knox’s ex-boyfriend at a hotel near Italy’s border with Slovenia and Austria after he and the American student were convicted for a second time in the death of British student Meredith Kercher.
The cabinet chief of the Udine police station, Giovanni Belmonte, said police showed up at about 1 a.m. Friday at a hotel in Venzone, about 40 kilometers from the border, where Raffaele Sollecito and his current girlfriend were staying. They took him to the Udine police station, took his passport and put a stamp in his Italian identity papers showing that he cannot leave the country. He will be freed later, Belmonte said.
The court in Florence on Thursday upheld the conviction against Knox and Sollecito. It did not immediately order Sollecito’s arrest.
Knox was sentenced to 28¹/₂ years in prison, and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito to 25 years, by an Italian appeals court, in the latest reversal in the confounding murder case.
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Knox, 26, was half a world away in Washington state when the verdict was read in Florence, but had already made clear she wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m going to fight this to the very end,” she said in an interview with Robin Roberts on ABC’s “Good Morning America Friday morning.
Knox said she was caught off guard by the decision of the Italian court.
“It hit me like a train. I didn’t expect this to happen. They found me innocent before; how could they?”
“I’m definitely not going back to Italy willingly,” Knox told The Guardian. “They’ll have to catch me and pull me back kicking and screaming into a prison that I don’t deserve to be in. I will fight for my innocence.”
Knox said she thought she was in the clear after being freed from an Italian jail in 2011 after an appeal of her 2009 conviction.
It was the third trial for Knox and Sollecito, whose first two trials in the 2007 slaying of British exchange student Meredith Kercher produced flip-flop verdicts of guilty, then innocent.
After the acquittal in 2011, Knox returned to the U.S., where she evidently hoped to put herself beyond the reach of Italian law. But Italy’s supreme court soon ordered a third trial.
On Thursday, the panel of two judges and six lay jury members deliberated 11½ hours before issuing its decision, stiffening Knox’s original 26-year sentence, apparently to take into account an additional conviction for slander, while confirming Sollecito’s 25-year term.
Italy has not yet said whether it will seek to extradite Knox.