The British news, Telegraph.co.uk, reported today that a man has come forward claiming that his brother, Antonio Aviello, murdered Meredith Kercher in a botched robbery. Interestingly, Luciano Aviello, brother of the Antonio, claims that he notified police three times in 2007 and his evidence wasn’t deemed reliable.
Could this be a turning point in the Knox case? Mr. Aviello claims that his brother gave him a knife and keys to hide after he showed up at his home on November 1st, 2007.
Here is the article from the Telegraph.co.uk:
“The claim may offer fresh hope to Knox, who in December was convicted of murdering the British student and sentenced to 26 years in prison.
It will form part of an appeal that her lawyers are preparing and that is expected to be heard in the autumn in Perugia, Umbria, where the crime took place.
Luciano Aviello, 41, who is serving 17 years in jail after being convicted of being a member of the Naples-based Camorra mafia, claims that he has evidence that Miss Kercher was killed by his brother, Antonio.
He insists that the two men convicted alongside Knox of the murder – her Italian boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Rudy Guede, a local drifter – are also innocent of the crime and should have their jail sentences of 25 years and 16 years quashed.
“It was my brother who killed Meredith on the night of November 1, 2007. Amanda, Raffaele and Guede are innocent,” Aviello told a weekly magazine, Oggi (“Today”).
“I know because my brother confessed to me and asked me to hide a blood-stained knife and a bunch of keys. I hid them underneath a wall, behind my house, covering them with soil and rubble.”
He claimed he could show investigators exactly where the knife and the keys were hidden.
Aviello wrote to court authorities in Perugia three times during the course of the murder investigation and subsequent trial, but his evidence was deemed unreliable.
Now, however, Knox’s defence team are demanding that it be heard as they put together an appeal which they hope could save her from spending much of her adult life behind bars.
In March, her lawyers, Carlo Dalla Vedova and Luciano Ghirga, visited Aviello in the prison near Turin where he is being held and videotaped a statement he made.
They want him to be admitted as a witness when the appeal gets underway.
“Why should he not be considered credible when the prosecution was allowed, during the trial, to call witnesses who turned out to be unreliable, to say the least?” said Mr Dalla Vedova.
The convicted mafioso is from Naples but was living in Perugia at the time of the murder.
He claims that his brother was staying with him in late 2007 and that one night he returned home with an injury to his right arm and his jacket covered in blood.
He alleged his brother and an Albanian man named Florio broke into the hillside cottage that Miss Kercher, 21, shared with Knox and two Italian women.
The Leeds University student was alone in the house, which sits on its own just outside the city’s ancient stone walls.
The men were looking to steal anything of value, but when Miss Kercher saw them, she started screaming.
According to this version of events, Antonio Aviello tried to silence her by putting his hand over her mouth but she resisted and he allegedly ended up fatally stabbing her.
It is not known what has motivated Aviello to point the blame at his brother, although defendants who cooperate with Italian police and prosecutors can often expect their jail sentences to be reduced.
Miss Kercher, of Coulsdon, Surrey, was found lying dead in a pool of blood in her bedroom on the morning of Nov 2, 2007.
Some of her clothes had been removed, and she had several deep stab wounds to her neck.
Antonio Aviello’s whereabouts are unknown.”
What are your thoughts on this turn of events? Do you think that the court in Perugia is so biased against Knox already that they will not seriously consider this new “evidence?” How does this impact students who are abroad and considering Italy as a destination? Please share your thoughts in the comments section.
Luciano Aviello has a history of making such claims. They always turn out to be false. Judge Federico Cafiero described him as “completely unreliable”. Aviello’s account of what happened to Meredith is completely contradicted by the established facts.
The fact that the defence teams are relying on the ridiculous claims of a convicted child killer and a convicted mobster shows that they are desperately clutching at straws.
What claims has Aviello made? Please let us know how you know about his alleged history of false claims.
This article about Luciano Aviello was published in the Il Mattino newspaper:
“The Meredith Case – A Mariano Clan Supergrass Pops Up: “Amanda Is Innocent”
By Gigi di Fiore
In the newsroom of the Mattino he seemed at ease. Luciano Aviello was [20 years ago] just over twenty years old, and had asked to recount his experience as a “streetwise youth in the Mariano Camorra clan”.
In an earlier time, a war was in full swing in the Spanish Quarter [of Naples] between the Mariano clan, the “picuozzo” [another name for this clan after the “picuozzo” or cord around a monk’s habit] and the Di Biase family, also known as the “faiano”.
The DDA (Direzione Distrettuale Antimafia or Distict Anti-Mafia Directorate) did not yet exist, but Federico Cafiero de Raho was already employed as prosecutor in the investigations into organized crime.
It was he who dealt with that bloody war. Twenty years later, Aviello had become a news-magazine character. Now in his own words, he claims to have a rolet in the Perugia trial for the Meredith Kercher case as a “decisive” witness.
On 19 April of last year, he addressed two little hand-written pages to the President of the Court of Assizes of Perugia, Giancarlo Massei. He declared himself ready to tell the truth, and revealed that he had twice given some friends of his the task of breaking the seals on the house where the crime took place.
On 31 March of this year, Amanda Knox’s defense team video-recorded the declarations made by Aviello, who is now 41 years old. As the weekly news-magazine “Oggi” writes, he said: “It was my brother who murdered Amanda [sic]. I can recover for you the knife used in the crime and the keys of that house”.
This fellow arrived on the third floor of via Chiatamone [Editor’s office of the Mattino] wearing casual clothes with a pretence of elegance: he never retracts anything, always seeking to find suitable words to best describe his “revelations”.
Contact lenses, slim, a cousin killed because he was affiliated to the Mariano clan, Aviello spoke, revealing an outline personality, in a shadow world of braggadoccio, always on the sidelines of the dealings and violent acts of those in power among the clans of the Quarter at that time.
He ended up in jail, having confessed to a murder. It wasn’t true, but they had promised him 5 million lira, a lawyer and an annuity.
The clan didn’t respect the pact, and so he began to talk freely. Enticed by the good life, he began to act as a gofer/go-between selling “black lottery” tickets. He felt important. He earned 500 thousand lira per week.
It wasn’t bad. Then he did “embassies” [message-running], little services, but never great criminal leaps. The clans considered him “not very trustworthy”.
He was implicated in the investigation into the Spanish Quarter Camorra, and convicted.
Today, Federico Cafiero, now deputy prosecutor and DDA Coordinator for the investigations into the Caserta province clans, says of him: “He was altogether untrustworthy, although every so often he would invent a new one [new story]. A revelation, as he would call it, which would subsequently reveal itself to be out and out nonsense”.
Such as when he said that he knew where Angela Calentano was to be found, or that he knew the hideouts of the main fugitives of the D’Alessandro di Castellammare clan.
For his “revelations” against Tiziana Maiolo, ex president of the Justice Commission of the Chamber, he was hit with a trial, in 1997, for calumny.
Two years ago, he fired off his biggest tale yet: he accused a public prosecutor from Potenza in the famous trial on “dirty robes” between Catanzaro and Salerno. He was given an audience by the prosecutor Rosa Volpe in Salerno.
He had announced revelations. His contradictions were immediately exposed.
On those occasions also, the sources of his stories were newspaper articles or gossip with his cell-mates. Such as Raffaele Sollecito, or Gennaro Cappiello for the “dirty robes” investigation.
A compulsive liar, a seeker of publicity?
Twenty years ago, Aviello seemed to be a self-centred person, proud to present himself as a witness to “important facts”. But he never managed to arrive at a scheme of constant collaboration.
For various crimes, he has so far served 17 years in jail. Now the Perugia case appears. Who knows?
If Aviello is the killer where was his DNA at the scene? Why did authorities find nothing missing if he was there to steal? And…lastly, why was Miss Kercher found sexually assaulted? What she was was assaulted after she was dead and stabbed…? Answer those questions and then tell me Aviello did it!!!!!!!
That is all….
AF in Guede's confession = Antonio and Florio. If the AF statement can be trusted then what she may have said was their names.