THE EX-BOYFRIEND OF Amanda Knox says he wasn’t fleeing Italy when he drove to Austria while an appeals court deliberated his fate in the death of a British student.
In an interview with US broadcaster NBC News broadcast on Friday, Raffaele Sollecito said he had been planning to take a trip outside Italy if acquitted, and turned back from Austria as soon as he learned he had been convicted a second time for the 2007 slaying of Meredith Kercher.
He said he checked into the first hotel once back in Italy because he was tired. Police found him there Friday morning, and confiscated his passport and ID papers, as called for by the court.
Sollecito told NBC: “I didn’t want to flee, or to get away because I actually went back.”
A court in Italy reinstated the guilty verdict against Sollecito and Amanda Knox for the 2007 killing on Thursday.
Knox, who has remained in her home in Seattle in the US during the appeal, has said she had not expected the verdict. In an interview yesterday, she said she would “never go willingly” to Italy to face the country’s judicial system.
Knox and Sollecito were found guilty of the killing in 2009 but the verdict was overturned in 2011.
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