#Knox : Amanda Knox lawyers accused of 'Nazi tactics'

Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini describes Knox team's criticism of Italy's national police forensic service and its findings as slander

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Amanda Knox in court in Perugia for the prosecution summing-up in her appeal trial. Photograph: Mario Laporta/AFP/Getty Images

 

The Italian prosecutor who put Amanda Knox in jail has accused her and her lawyers of using the same tactics as the Nazis and asked the court that will decide her appeal not to be swayed by a campaign designed to discredit Italian justice.

In an emotional closing address on Friday, during which he also showed the jurors grisly crime scene footage of the dead British student, Meredith Kercher, the prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, described criticism by Knox's defence of Italy's national police forensic service and its findings as slander.

But then, he added, slander had played an important role in the case. Knox, he said, had slandered the police and her employer, Patrick Lumumba. After she was arrested for Kercher's murder four years ago, the American student claimed she was slapped by police during her interrogation and made a statement, which she later withdrew, naming the Congolese bar owner Lumumba as the murderer.

"Slander, slander and some of it will stick," declared Mignini. "It's what the noted propaganda minister of the Nazis used to say in the 1930s."

Earlier, he told the court: "Our judicial system has been subjected to a systematic denigration by a well-organised operation of a journalistic and political nature."

Knox is appealing against a 26-year sentence. Her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, the son of an Italian doctor, is also challenging his 25-year sentence.

Their convictions have been widely questioned in the US media. But, in court, the biggest setback for the prosecution came in June when two court-appointed Italian experts made scathing criticisms of the crucial forensic evidence used to convict the two alleged killers.

Kercher was found stabbed to death four years ago at the age of 21 in the flat she shared with Knox while they were both studying at Perugia's university for foreigners. A third man, Rudy Guede, a small-time drugs peddler from the Ivory Coast, has also been convicted of the murder, which the lower court decided arose from a four-way sex game resisted by Kercher.

The national sensitivities that have always lurked below the surface of this tangled affair had also surfaced earlier when Giancarlo Costagliola, the associate chief prosecutor of Perugia, said he and his colleagues were victims of an "obsessive" media campaign helped by American ignorance of the Italian justice system.

With Knox's mother, father and stepfather sitting just a few feet away, he said the outcry over the alleged failings in the case against her "makes everyone feel like the parents of Amanda Knox". Looking at the two judges and six jurors (technically lay judges), he went on: "We hope, in deciding, you will feel a little like Meredith Kercher's parents." The Leeds university student was, he said, someone who was "clever, serious and very tied to her family and whom these kids from rich families prevented from living".

Knox had entered the court for the start of the prosecution summing-up looking tense and serious, her face notably pallid.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/23/amanda-knox-prosecutor-accuses-lawyers