The man who killed Meredith Kercher is released from prison in Italy | Meredith Kercher

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Rudy Guidi, the only person definitively convicted of the murder of British student Meredith Kercher, has been released from prison after serving 13 years of a 16-year sentence.

A judge in the Italian town of Viterbo has agreed to further reduce Guede’s sentence, which was due to expire on January 4, by an additional 45 days for good behaviour.

Francesco Marisca, a lawyer representing the Kircher family, said that while it was normal for sentences to be reduced, a “moral reflection” might have been justified about whether “such a reduced sentence would suffice for a murder of this nature”.

Guede was initially sentenced to 30 years in prison in 2008 after a speedy trial, but that was reduced on appeal to 16 years.

“It’s going to be another aspect that I need to explain to Meredith’s family,” Marisca told La Stampa newspaper. “Every time, he transcends legitimacy, renewing their unspeakable suffering.”

Kircher, a 21-year-old student from Coulsdon, Surrey, was murdered at her home in the university city of Perugia in November 2007. Her body was found in her bedroom, partially stripped from her clothes with multiple stab wounds. She was also sexually assaulted.

The convictions of two other suspects, Amanda Knox, an American student who shared the house with Kercher, and her former Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, were overturned.

Guede has always denied killing Kercher, although his DNA was found in Kercher’s body and in her bedroom.

“My first thoughts are with Meredith Kercher’s family who have had to face this painful case,” Guede’s lawyer, Fabrizio Ballarini, told the Italian press, adding that he was “very satisfied with the re-education” that Guede had undertaken.

He was first granted his one-day release from Viterbo prison in 2017 to complete a master’s degree in Sociology, and in December last year was assigned to the Social Services Department to carry out the rest of his community service sentence. Guede spent his morning volunteering for the Catholic charity Caritas and the afternoon working at the criminology center library in Viterbo.

Claudo Mariani, who teaches at the Center for Criminology, told Ansa that Guede “now just wants to be forgotten”.

“There is nothing more to add to this story than the fact that a young English girl’s life has been cut short, and from her family we can learn the dignity and value of silence,” said Mariani.

Knox and Solecito spent four years in prison after being initially convicted of Kercher’s murder.

They were acquitted in 2011 before being convicted again in 2014 by the Florence Court of Appeal, which ruled that multiple injuries to Kercher’s body proved Guede could not have acted alone. Italy’s highest court overturned the decision in a final ruling in 2015, over what it called “staggering flaws” in the investigation that led to the convictions of Knox and Solecito.

In response to Guede’s release, Sollecito told Adnkronos news agency: “Amanda and I risked conviction for something we didn’t do because of his lies. I’m only sorry he never regretted what he did, killing that poor girl.”

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