Expert: Insufficient evidence on Meredith sex assault

A court-appointed expert said today there was not enough evidence to conclude that a murdered British student had been sexually assaulted or strangled, nor was it possible to narrow the window of time in which she was killed.

Giancarlo Umani Ronchi spoke to reporters before entering the Perugia courthouse for a hearing conducted by a judge on evidence in the killing of 21-year-old Meredith Kercher in Perugia.

Miss Kercher was found dead on November 2 in a pool of blood in her bedroom of a rented house in Perugia, a medieval Umbrian university town with a large foreign student population.

Miss Kercher’s mother and a brother and a sister made no comment to reporters as they arrived for the closed-door hearing mid-morning.

Private Italian network Canale 5 reported that the hearing could last into the evening.

Three suspects have been jailed for months in the case, although no formal charges have been lodged against them.

Only one of the suspects attended the hearing. Police hustled handcuffed suspect Raffaele Sollecito, 24, an Italian student whose girlfriend at the time was one of Miss Kercher’s flatmates, into the courthouse. Sollecito, wearing a zippered, hooded white jacket, made no comment as he arrived.

His former girlfriend, American Amanda Knox, 20, of Seattle, and a third suspect in the case, Ivory Coast national Rudy Hermann Guede, stayed in jail. Guede, 21, has told investigators he was in the woman’s room the night she died but said that he did not kill her.

The other suspects in the case also deny any wrongdoing.

Although prosecutors have raised the possibility that Miss Kercher was sexually assaulted, Mr Ronchi said that he and the other court-appointed experts found no evidence to confirm that.

“When no traces of sperm are found, when there are no traces of physical violence,” it is difficult to determine that there was sexual violence, Mr Ronchi said.

He also referred to earlier reported evidence that some male DNA had been found on Miss Kercher, saying “in any case, that would let you hypothesise physical contact”.

An post-mortem examination found that Miss Kercher had bled heavily from a stab wound to the neck.

Some news reports have said that the victim was strangled.

“It’s too much of a stretch to speak of strangulation,” the Italian news agency Apcom quoted Mr Ronchi as saying. In their report, the court-appointed experts concluded that there was “suffocation caused by the haemorrhage caused by the neck wound,” Mr Ronchi said.

“As far as strangulation goes, we are much more cautious,” Mr Ronchi was quoted by Apcom as saying. “There are signs, wounds that point in that direction. But there isn’t irrefutable certainty.”

The experts also weren’t able to narrow the arc of time when Miss Kercher died, he said.

“There are a lot of gaps” in determining when she died, Mr Ronchi said.

On Friday, Miss Kercher’s family expressed satisfaction with the investigation and met with prosecutor Giuliano Mignini.

Judges have ruled that the suspects could be held for up to a year while the case is investigated.