A tearful Amanda Knox arrived home
in the US and thanked her supporters a day after she was acquitted of
murder and sexual assault charges, ending a four-year ordeal in an Italian jail.
A tearful Amanda Knox arrived home in the US and thanked
her supporters a day after she was acquitted of murder and sexual assault
charges, ending a four-year ordeal in an Italian jail.
"I'm really overwhelmed right now. I was looking down
from the airplane and it seemed like everything wasn't real," Knox said as
she addressed supporters and a media scrum at Seattle airport shortly after her
plane landed.
"What's important for me to say is just thank you to
everyone who's believed in me, who's defended me, who has supported my
family," she said in her first public comments since being freed, brushing
away tears.
"My family's the most important thing to me right now. I
just want to go be with them. So thank you for being there for me."
Her parents, Kurt Knox and Etta Mellas, also offered their
thanks, as they accompanied their daughter off the plane and back home.
Lawyer Theodore Simon said the 24-year-old had been through
"a trying and grueling four-year nightmarish marathon that no child or
parent should have to endure."
Knox left Rome swiftly after the decision was handed down by
an Italian court, first heading for London to board a connecting flight to
Seattle on the US west coast.
She had been convicted along with two others and sentenced to
26 years in prison for taking part in the murder and sexual assault of her
British housemate Meredith Kercher, then 21, who was found stabbed to death in
the cottage they shared.
Knox's ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who also had appealed
his conviction on the same charges, was likewise acquitted Monday in the
university town of Perugia in central Italy where Knox and Kercher were
studying.
Source : AFP
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