Amanda Knox begs Meredith Kercher's killer - 'Clear my name once and for all'

Amanda Knox has called on the sole person to have been definitively convicted of the murder of Meredith Kercher to confess to the crime and clear her name.

Rudy Guede, a drifter who was found guilty of murdering and raping the British student at a trial in 2008, was released from prison in Viterbo, central Italy, on Tuesday after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence. He was released early for good behaviour.

He has always denied committing the crime but his DNA was found on Ms Kercher’s body and at the crime scene.

He was arrested after fleeing to Germany in the days after Ms Kercher’s body was found in the house she shared with Ms Knox in the university town of Perugia, Umbria. She had been stabbed multiple times.

“Guede holds a tremendous power to heal others harmed by his actions. He has the power to tell the truth, to take responsibility, to stop blaming me for the rape and murder of Meredith Kercher, which a wealth of evidence shows he committed alone,” Ms Knox wrote on Twitter.

She insisted that Guede had “acted alone” in murdering Ms Kercher.

But Italy’s Supreme Court ruled that the Leeds University student was killed by more than one person, with the other aggressor or aggressors remaining unidentified.

“Were he actually to acknowledge his responsibility, it would bring closure to the Kercher family, it would end the murky speculation around this case, it would restore my wrongly damaged reputation and that of Raffaele.

“Today Rudy’s free, and he has yet to tell the truth, allowing others to continue bearing the burden of his guilt,” Ms Knox wrote. “Guede could do all that right now. He could ask for forgiveness.”

Ms Knox, from Seattle, and her then boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were initially accused of murdering Ms Kercher and found guilty at their first trial in Perugia.

They both spent four years in prison. After a years-long legal saga they were subsequently acquitted by the Supreme Court in Rome.

Ms Kercher, 21, from Coulsdon in Surrey, was murdered in November 2007. She was on a year’s study abroad in Perugia, a popular destination for foreign students.

While Ms Knox says she was falsely accused by Guede, she in turn falsely accused her then boss of the murder of Ms Kercher.

She told police during her initial questioning that the murder had been committed by Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese man who ran a pub in Perugia.

He spent nearly two weeks in prison before being cleared of any involvement in the crime.