Meredith Kercher killer accused of beating up his ex-girlfriend
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The man convicted of murdering Meredith Kercher, the British student, has been accused of beating up his girlfriend.
Rudy Guede was jailed for the 2007 murder after Kercher, from Coulsdon in Surrey, was found in the bedroom of her rented accommodation in the Italian university town of Perugia, partially undressed and with multiple stab wounds.
The two other people accused of being involved in her murder, Amanda Knox, an American undergraduate, and her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were initially convicted but ultimately acquitted of the crime after a tortuous legal process.
New charges
Guede, who is originally from the Ivory Coast and came to Italy as a child, was released from prison in November 2021 after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.
The 36-year-old has now been issued with a restraining order and fitted with an electronic tag after being accused of physically abusing an ex-girlfriend.
A judge in Viterbo in the region of Lazio, where Guede lives, ordered him to stay at least 500 metres away from his former girlfriend, who is in her early twenties.
Prosecutors had wanted him to be placed under house arrest.
He is being investigated on charges of personal injury, ill-treatment and violence, according to Ansa, the national news agency.
Guede is yet to publicly respond to the allegations.
He has always insisted he had nothing to do with the murder of Kercher, a Leeds University student who had come to Italy for a year to study.
Guede claimed he had been on a date with her, had gone to the lavatory, and then came back to her bedroom to find her stabbed to death.
Fled by train
After the murder, he fled by train to Germany, where he was arrested a few days later. His DNA was found at the murder scene as well as on the student’s body.
Ms Kercher was sharing a house in Perugia with Ms Knox, from Seattle, and two Italian women.
In response to the news that Guede had been accused of domestic violence, Ms Knox told Ansa: “I’m very sorry for his ex-girlfriend. How frightening.”
Her former co-accused, Mr Sollecito, said: “I don’t follow Guede’s life but in light of what has happened, it seems like he hasn’t changed very much.
“The person that he was before being sent to prison, the person that we found out about from the evidence, sadly that’s been reconfirmed.”
Guede was released from prison early because of good behaviour. For about two years before his release, he had been allowed out on day release and had worked at a centre for criminology in Viterbo.
Ms Knox and Mr Sollecito spent four years in jail after they were initially convicted of the murder of the young British woman, a case which garnered huge attention on both sides of the Atlantic.
They were acquitted in 2011, only to be convicted again in 2014 by an appeals court in Florence.
But those convictions were then overturned by Italy’s supreme court in 2015, in a definitive ruling that closed the case.
