Lawyer warns Knox will flee Italy

30 September 2011 Last updated at 07:16 ET

Amanda Knox has a “million dollar” PR campaign, say prosecutors.

An Italian prosecutor has warned that Amanda Knox will “run away abroad” if she is absolved of the 2007 murder of UK student Meredith Kercher.

Giuliano Mignini also attacked Knox’s “million dollar” publicity campaign and rejected charges she had been “crucified” by the media.

Knox, 24, and Raffaele Sollecito, 27, are challenging their convictions for the murder, which happened in Perugia.

A verdict in the appeal is expected on Monday.

Prosecutors have said they will appeal if the verdict is overturned.

However Knox would be free to leave Italy in the meantime, so any appeal may have to take place in her absence.

If Knox’s verdict is upheld, she has one more chance to appeal.

Knox ‘not crucified’

Summing up the prosecution’s case in the final days of the appeal, Mr Mignini was critical of the publicity campaign Knox’s family and their supporters have launched, both in Italy and in the US.

He asked the jury: “Have ever seen a defendant who hires a big PR agency? She has a publicity campaign behind her that cost up to a million dollars.”

And he said that, far from Knox being “crucified” by the media, as her supporters allege she has been, it is the police forensic scientists, who analysed crucial murder evidence, who have come under fire.

Mr Mignini also accused Knox of trying to pin all the blame for the murder of Miss Kercher, who came from Coulsdon, south London, on “the black guy”.

Rudy Guede, 22, who has joint Italian and Ivorian nationality, has already been convicted of Miss Kercher’s killing and was sentenced to 30 years in prison, reduced to 16 years on appeal.

Referring to Sollecito, who was also convicted of murder and sexual assault and is also challenging his conviction in this appeal, Mignini said the two had co-ordinated their defence. “ wanted to make a pact of steel and blame it all on the black guy,” he said.

He added “[Knox and Sollecito] covered their tracks well. The poor black guy will pay for everyone.”

The body of Miss Kercher was found on November 2 2007 in her bedroom of the house she shared with Knox and two other Italian girls.

Mr Magnini said he saw Miss Kercher’s “brutallised corpse” with his own eyes and added that when pictures of the body were shown in court: “Amanda never looked at them”.

He repeated the prosecution’s case that an apparent break-in at the house where the murder took place had clearly been staged, and that a broken window could not have been smashed from the outside because the wooden blinds were closed.

— ’re ’s , . : A ‘Malign Intellectual Subculture’ – George Monbiot Smears Chomsky, Herman, Peterson, Pilger And Media Lens.