We didn’t hit Foxy Knoxy, say police
ITALIAN police last night hit back at claims that they physically intimidated Amanda Knox, the American student accused of murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher, 21.
Knox, nicknamed Foxy Knoxy, had claimed that she was hit on the head by detectives when she did not remember a fact correctly.
But Inspector Rita Ficarra told the court in Perugia: “She was treated firmly and courteously.”
At that a lawyer cut in angrily, saying: “This is not Guantanamo.”
The exchange came as Inspector Ficarra, of the city’s Flying Squad, described 21-year-old Knox’s bizarre behaviour after her arrest following the killing in 2007.
“I was in the elevator and when I got to the floor where the Flying Squad department is the door opened and I saw Amanda doing floor exercises,” he said.
“She was doing the splits, cartwheels and arching herself backwards, pressing her hands on the floor. I said to her, ‘What on earth are you doing? Is this the right way to behave?’
“Amanda told me that she was waiting for colleagues to finish with Raffaele [her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito] and that she was getting bored and fed up with being at the police station.
“I told her that she may well be tired and bored but that a friend of hers had been killed, in the house they shared and that if she was at the police station, then it was because her presence was useful to find the killer.
“I told her off and said she should behave better – I knew she had also been kissing and cuddling Raffaele while she was there and jumping up and down.
“I also told her that she was at the police station because contradictions had emerged in what she had told us and what others had told us – I told her she had denied using drugs but we knew that she did.”
Inspector Ficarra described the moment when Knox falsely accused bar owner Patrick Lumumba of killing Meredith in the student digs the girls shared.
The Inspector said: “Amanda was asked who Meredith’s friends were and she got her mobile phone out and went through the names.
“When she got to Patrick Lumumba’s name she put her hands in her hair and said, ‘It’s him, It was him. He is mad. He killed her’. Then she began to cry.”
Knox is also accused of slandering Mr Lumumba, 38, who was held in jail for two weeks. He is now seeking £1million in damages from her.
Meredith, of Coulsdon, Surrey, an exchange student from Leeds University, was found semi-naked and with her throat cut. Knox and Sollecito, 24, deny murdering her in a drug-fuelled sex game.
The trial continues.
