Amanda Knox Appeal: New Witness Says His Mobster Brother Killed Meredith Kercher
NEW YORK (CBS) Amanda Knox didn't kill Meredith Kercher, a Mafioso did - at least according to his Mafia informant brother, Luciano Aviello.
In the latest twist in the tangled case of the murdered British exchange student, who was found naked with her throat slashed in the apartment she shared with Knox, Aviello has apparently reached out to Knox's defense team, as they begin to build their case for an appeal of Knox's conviction, to proclaim Knox's innocence along with that of the two other men who have been convicted of the crime, according to the Daily Mail.
After Aviello reached out to defense attorneys Carlo Dalla Vedova and Luciano Ghirga, they visited the Mafia turncoat in Ivrea prison outside Turin and took a videotaped statement, and plan to include it in their appeal request, according to the British newspaper.
In the statement Aviello claims that his brother Antonio came to his house the night Kercher was killed and asked him to hide a bloodstained knife and set of keys, allegedly the keys that are still missing from the crime scene, the Mail reported.
"When he came to my house he had a bloodstained jacket," Aviello says in the statement. "He said he had broken into a house and killed a girl and then he had run away."
Aviello, a convicted mobster serving 17 years for Mafia association, also says that he hid the knife and keys under a wall behind the house in Perugia, Italy where he was living at the time. He also claims to have contacted the court multiple times during the 2009 trial of Knox and her former boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, but was never questioned, according to the paper.
In a statement to the Daily Mail, Dalla Vedova said that the information Aviello provided "is very important and his statement is part of our appeal."
"We are asking that he be called and give evidence," Dalla Vedova tells the paper. "What he has to say is very significant because the keys to the house were never found."
No date has been set for the appeal but it is expected to be heard sometime in the fall.
The brother Aviello is fingering could not be reached for comment by the Daily Mail.
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