Amanda Knox Protests Innocence In TV Interview

Amanda Knox has protested her innocence in her first television interview since being freed from prison.

The 25-year-old student, who is facing a retrial over the killing of Briton Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007, said: "I'd like to be reconsidered as a person."

Miss Kercher, 21, was found stabbed to death in the flat she shared with Knox in Perugia.

Italian prosecutors claim Miss Knox and her then-boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, killed Miss Kercher in a drug-fuelled sex game along with another man.

That man, Ivory Coast native Rudy Guede, is currently serving a 16-year sentence for killing Miss Kercher, from Coulsdon, Surrey.

In the ABC News interview, to be aired later on Tuesday, Knox said: "I was in the courtroom when they were calling me a devil.

"I mean, it’s one thing to be called certain things in the media, it's another to be sitting in a courtroom, fighting for your life, while people are calling you a devil.

"For all intents and purposes I was a murderer, whether I was or not.

"I had to live with the idea that that would be my life.

"I want the truth to come out. I'd like to be reconsidered as a person.

"What happened to me was surreal, but it could have happened to anyone."

Knox's murder conviction was overturned in October 2011, but in March an Italian court ordered a retrial for both her and Sollecito, 29.

Knox denies being involved in the killing, and her legal team says she was forced to say things she did not mean during a lengthy police interrogation.

They also accuse Italian police of contaminating the crime scene.