Italy’s highest court has decided to uphold the conviction of Amanda Knox for slander related to the 2007 murder of her British flatmate, Meredith Kercher.

The ruling is the latest part of a 17-year legal saga which ultimately exonerated her for the 2007 fatal stabbing in the Italian university town of Perugia, north of Rome.

British student Meredith Kercher, 21, was brutally murdered in the apartment she shared with Amanda Knox, the American who was initially found guilty of the killing along with her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito.

Ms Knox served four years in prison before being acquitted in 2011, along with Mr Sollecito. They were fully exonerated by Italy’s highest court in 2015.

But among a complex series of legal twists and turns, in June 2024, an appeals court in Florence handed Ms Knox, 37, a
three-year sentence for wrongly accusing a Congolese man of the murder.

Patrick Lumumba was the owner of a bar where Ms Knox, then a 20-year-old university student, had worked part-time.

She avoided jail as the sentence counted as time already served in prison.

Last June, she lost her bid to overturn that conviction and later told Sky TG24, Sky News’ sister channel in Italy, that she was a “victim” and did not slander anyone.

“I didn’t slander Patrick; I didn’t kill my friend [Meredith]. I have been unjustly accused for 17 years. I spent four years in prison as an innocent,” she said.

She claimed that during her initial police questioning, she was “psychologically tortured, abused and mistreated” by officers.

Ms Knox was not at the hearing at Italy’s top court on Thursday, instead following it from the US. Earlier this week she wrote on X that “waiting is the hardest part”.

But her lawyer, Luca Luparia Donati, told Sky News they were “incredulous” at the decision and would consider “supranational initiatives to rectify what we believe to be a judicial error”.

Patrick Lumumba, who was in the court, said: “I am very satisfied because Amanda made a mistake and this sentence must accompany her for her entire life.”

Ms Knox was ordered to pay the trial’s legal costs, as well as those of Mr Lumumba’s lawyer.

Read more:
Knox: Why was she back in court?
Knox Film: Trial Was ‘Soap Opera’

Amanda Knox is now a mother of two small children who advocates for criminal justice reform and campaigns against wrongful convictions.

Another man, Rudy Guede, from the Ivory Coast, was convicted of sexual assault and murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene.

He was freed in 2021, after serving 13 years of a 16-year term.

Former Perugia public prosecutor Giuliano Mignini, who led the investigation into Ms Kercher’s murder, told Sky News last year that “there may still be a culprit who took part in the murder and who has not been discovered yet”.

Mobile network Three has apologised after customers across the country reported problems making and receiving voice calls.

More than 10,000 people have logged problems on outage site Downdetector, with the first issues reported around 1pm.

The network said a “small percentage” of customers were affected and that it was working hard to fix it.

People on X reported problems in places such as Yorkshire, Derbyshire, North Lanarkshire and London.

“Six hours in and I still can’t make or receive a call!” said user @nameisrichard.

“I’m trying to organise my mother’s funeral and I can’t make, or receive, a single call. It’s appalling,” said @flynn1965.

@bertis100 posted: “We have no coverage since 1pm in Motherwell Scotland.”

The network first apologised this afternoon but said data and 999 calls were working as normal.

Three repeated the message at 7.30pm and said it was “really sorry” for the inconvenience.

However, its latest message only mentioned data services were unaffected, suggesting emergency calls might be impacted after all.

The firm’s coverage checker is currently unavailable on its website.

Read more from Sky News:
Meta denies ‘forcing’ people to follow Trump
Digital driving licences to be introduced this year

More than 5,000 people were still self-reporting problems on the Downdetector site just before 8pm.

It was announced last month that Three’s merger with Vodafone had been approved, with the companies promising an improved service and an £11bn investment programme.

The merger is expected to formally complete during the first half of 2025.

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Warning: This livestream may contain distressing content.

Watch live as Southport killer Axel Rudakubana is sentenced today (23 January) for murdering three young girls in a frenzied knife attack last year.

Rudakubana, 18, stabbed and killed the girls, aged between six and nine, with a 20cm-long kitchen knife as he ambushed a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport, Merseyside.

Wearing a surgical face mask while armed with the blade, the then 17-year-old travelled five miles from his family home to the studio where he killed Alice da Silva Aguiar, Bebe King and Elsie Dot Stancombe.

As a trial was set to begin at Liverpool Crown Court on Monday, the teenager pleaded guilty to the murder of the three children as well as the attempted murders of eight others.

He also admitted production of a biological toxin and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism. He also pleaded guilty to possession of a knife.

Back at Liverpool Crown Court on Thursday, he will be sentenced for a total of 16 charges.

Customers of the mobile network, Three, have told the BBC they cannot make 999 calls, as the network faces a significant outage.

The firm has apologised after more than ten thousand people told outage tracker Downdetector they were unable to make or receive phone calls on Thursday.

The BBC has been told by members of the public that 999 calls will not connect from their devices using the Three network. The BBC has not been able to independently verify their claims.

Three told the BBC it was “investigating this urgently”, adding that data from emergency services showed the “majority” of 999 calls were being “connected via other networks”.

There have also been several thousand reports from users of Smarty and ID Mobile – smaller mobile companies which use Three’s network.

Three’s support team has been telling customers that it does not “have a timeframe” for a fix, but that the firm is “working hard to resolve this as soon as possible”.

In a statement to the BBC, a Three spokesperson said the company is “aware of a number of reports that customers have not been able to connect to 999 calls”.

“We are taking this very seriously and are investigating this urgently and we apologise if anyone has been unable to successfully contact emergency services.

“Call data from the emergency services shows that the majority of 999 calls being placed via our network are being connected via other networks,” the spokesperson added.

In an earlier statement, Three had said that people were still able to use mobile data services and make 999 calls during the outage, though multiple people had told the BBC that was not the case for them.

Three has around 10.5m customers across the UK, according to its website, but it is unclear how many of them are affected by the outages.

Many people on social media have shared their frustration at the outage and described the disruption they said it had caused them.

One person claimed they had “missed a medical appointment” as a result of being unable to receive calls, while another said the issues had left their daughter “stranded”.

And several people have claimed they would be leaving the network altogether.

In a statement the regulator Ofcom said: “We are aware that Three is experiencing problems with its network. We are in contact with Three to establish the scale and cause of the problem as soon as possible.”

It is not known whether customers will be able to claim compensation for the outage, although according to the Ofcom website it “may be appropriate” for providers to offer refunds “while repairs are being made”.

It comes a month after the UK regulator gave the go-ahead for Three to merge with former rival Vodafone in a £16.5bn deal.

It comes the same day a major outage affected artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT.

Former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng has accused authorities of suppressing crucial information about the Southport dance class killer, claiming they presented him as “a Welsh choir boy” to the public.

Speaking on GB News, Kwarteng said officials “clearly knew things about the killer which they suppressed” in the aftermath of the attacks.

GB News / CPS

“Either they suppressed it for whatever reason, and we need to get to the bottom of it, or it was a cover up because they felt that in that very patronising way, they felt that people couldn’t handle that information,” Kwarteng said.

Rudakubana, 18, pleaded guilty earlier this week to murdering three young girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport last July.

He is due to be sentenced today at Liverpool Crown Court – while his crimes could warrant a whole life order, this cannot be applied as he was 17 at the time of the offences.

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Kwarteng claimed Merseyside Police were instructed by “people on high” not to release information they had about the case.

Axel Rudakubana will be sentenced in court today for the Southport attack

CPS/PA

“What was so crazy about that was that it actually stoked the very thing that they wanted to avoid because people were kept in the dark,” he said.

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The former chancellor pointed to what he called an “obvious double standard” in how the case was handled.

“Picture a situation where the terrorist, the killer, had been a white teenager who had been found with white supremacist literature, who then went out and killed three girls of ethnic origin,” he said.

“There wouldn’t be this debate. They would have denounced it,” Kwarteng added. He also criticised how Rudakubana had “slipped through the net” despite being repeatedly referred to Prevent.

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Starmer has defended his position on withholding information about the Southport killer. The Prime Minister insisted he was following “the law of the land” to prevent the case against Rudakubana from collapsing.

Kwarteng questioned how the 18-year-old ‘slipped through the net’ after being referred to Prevent three times

GB News

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“You know and I know that it would not have been right to disclose those details,” Starmer told reporters. “The only losers if the details had been disclosed would be the victims and the families because it ran the risk the trial would collapse.”

Rudakubana faces a life sentence, with a minimum term to be set by the judge before he can be considered for release. Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said investigations revealed “a man with a unhealthy obsession with extreme violence” but noted that “no one ideology was uncovered.”

Deputy Chief Crown Prosecutor Ursula Doyle described it as “an unspeakable attack” that turned what should have been a day of “carefree innocence” into “a scene of the darkest horror.”

“It is clear that this was a young man with a sickening and sustained interest in death and violence,” she added.

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