Jailed Italian Mobster Says ‘Knox is Innocent.’

Another shocking and bizarre twist occurs in the Amanda Knox case. On 10 June, jailed Italian mobster, Luciano Aviello, claims that his brother killed Kercher during a botched burglary attempt. Last week, Knox’s defense team, Carlo Dalla Vedova and Luciano Ghirga, went to the Ivrea prison outside Turin where Aviello is serving 17 years for mob-related crimes. In a videotaped statement, Aviello told the lawyers that his brother, Antonio, went to his house the night Kercher was killed and asked him to hide a bloodstained knife and set of keys. The significance of that statement is that Kercher’s set of keys to the cottage have never been recovered, and the Mariette-knife that the prosecution claimed was the murder weapon was called ‘seriously flawed’ and ‘contaminated’ by several expert defense witnesses.

“It was my brother who killed Meredith on the night of November 1, 2007. Amanda, Raffaele and Guede are innocent,” Luciano Aviello, 41, told Knox's lawyers. "When he [Antonio] came to my house he had a bloodstained jacket," Aviello says in the statement. “He said he had broken into a house and killed a girl and then he had run away.” According to Aviello, his brother and a friend named Florio (an Albanian man) went into the cottage to steel paintings and found Kercher alone. Kercher began screaming loudly and Antonio says that he stabbed her and they ran off into the night. “My brother confessed the murder to me and gave me the blood-stained knife and a set of keys (to hide)." Aviello said that he hid the knife and keys under a wall behind the house in Perugia, Italy where he was living at the time. Antonio's whereabouts are unknown, but he is thought to be in Naples.

Aviello has come forward with this information several times in 2009, and it has been confirmed that Knox’s defense team has known about this information as early as March 2010. The lead Prosecutor in the case, Giuliano Mignini, said he was aware that Aviello wrote to the judge in the Knox case several times but the judge dismissed it. “There is nothing else to say,” Mignini told UK’s the Daily Mail. So now we will have to wait and see if Aviello can produce these two key pieces of evidence. Personally, I think that if this evidence existed they would have already been provided. Here we have another case of a convict trying to get in the news, much like the rantings on the case by another convict, Mario Alessi.

Questions:

Why would experienced/mob-related criminals rob a known college dorm house looking for expensive paintings? This just doesn’t hold water in my opinion. Where is the physical evidence in the house belonging to these new suspects? Then there is also the fact that Rudy Guede was there, by his own admittance, fingerprints and footprints (as well as his DNA found inside of Kercher’s vagina). Guede also said that he heard a woman’s voice by the door and saw her silhouette as she and the alleged perpetrated (who threatened him with a knife) fled into the night. Not sure how this will be explained. Did they then find Guede in the bathroom of the house and intimidated him into silence? Is Aviello’s statement fantastic or fantastical?

Knox’s appeal is supposed to begin sometime this fall, where Knox’s lawyers are expected to bring up these new claims. Now we must play the waiting game again to see what developments occur and if these key pieces of evidence will be produced.