Word: murdered
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Amanda Knox has finally spoken. Ever since the 21-year-old American student was arrested in Italy in late 2007 and charged with the grisly murder of her British roommate Meredith Kercher, tabloids on both sides of the Atlantic have bubbled with scandal and speculation. Was she, as Italian and British reports suggest, a promiscuous party girl who lived like a slob and took strange men back to the house? Did she, as Italian prosecutors allege, cut Kercher's throat after she refused to take part in group sex with Knox; Knox's boyfriend at the time, Raffaele Sollecito...
...Knox to defend herself against. Forensic evidence includes bloody prints that allegedly match Sollecito's and Knox's feet and a knife found in Sollecito's apartment with the victim's DNA on it. The two have given conflicting accounts of their whereabouts, and there is evidence that the murder scene was tampered with before police arrived. Then there's the confession, in which Knox said she was at the house during the killing but blamed her boss, bar owner Patrick Lumumba (who was later cleared). The document was signed without a lawyer present and is inadmissible, but prosecutors produced...
...shooter, believed to be the third brother, Rustam Makhmudov, who remains at large. The third defendant, former police officer Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, allegedly recruited the Makhmudov brothers and supplied the pistol, and Sergei Ryaguzov, a former Federal Security Service officer, was accused of extortion in a case unrelated to the murder. (Read: "Murder, Russian-Style: Political Assassination...
...with a summit between Obama and Russian President Dimitri Medvedev scheduled for July 6-8, others posit that perhaps the retrial is a real quest for justice, however misguided. "There may be recognition in the government that the failure to hold someone to account for the murder of Politkovskaya is a glaring omission - and there should be accountability for such crimes, but within the bounds of fair trial protections," Allison Gill, director of Human Rights Watch in Russia, tells TIME. "It might be that the Kremlin wants to show that they want to get the job done." (See pictures...
...surface of it, the Supreme Court's call for a retrial in the case of Politkovskaya's murder seems to signal that Russia is finally tackling its culture of impunity. But clouded by murky motivations and the possibility that it could leave the real culprits running free, it may actually be doing just the opposite...