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First Posted: 3/26/2013 ROME &#8212; Italy&#8217;s highest criminal court ordered a whole new trial for Amanda Knox and her former Italian boyfriend on Tuesday, overturning their acquittals in the gruesome slaying of her British roommate.
The move extended a prolonged legal battle that has become a cause celebre in the United States and raised a host of questions about how the next phase of Italian justice would play out.
Knox, now a 25-year-old University of Washington student in Seattle, called the decision by the Rome-based Court of Cassation &#8220;painful&#8221; but said she was confident that she would be exonerated.
The American left Italy a free woman after her 2011 acquittal &#8212; but only after serving nearly four years of a 26-year prison sentence from a lower court that convicted her of murdering Meredith Kercher. The 21-year-old British exchange student&#8217;s body was found in November 2007 in a pool of blood in the bedroom of a rented house the two shared in the Italian university town of Perugia. Her throat had been slit.
Raffaele Sollecito, Knox&#8217;s Italian boyfriend at the time, was also convicted, sentenced and later acquitted.
It could be months before a date is set for a fresh appeals court trial for Knox and Sollecito in Florence, which was chosen because Perugia has only one appellate court.
Italian law cannot compel Knox to return for the new trial and one of her lawyers, Carlo Dalla Vedova, said she had no plans to do so.
&#8220;She thought that the nightmare was over,&#8221; Dalla Vedova told reporters on the steps of the courthouse. &#8220;(But) she&#8217;s ready to fight.&#8221;
Prosecutors alleged that Kercher was the victim of a drug-fueled sex game gone awry. Knox and Sollecito denied wrongdoing and said they weren&#8217;t even in the apartment that night, although they acknowledged they had smoked marijuana and their memories were clouded.
An Ivory Coast man, Rudy Guede, was convicted of the Kercher slaying in a separate proceeding and is serving a 16-year sentence.

Retrial ordered for Knox