Amanda Knox was ‘beaten by police’, says stepfather

The stepfather of Amanda Knox (pictured), the American girl accused of murdering her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Perugia, claims she was repeatedly beaten by Italian police during all-night interrogations.

Chris Mellas, 36, told the Independent on Sunday that it was only because of this intimidation that she confessed to having been in the flat she shared with Kercher on the night the British girl died. "It was coercion," he said. "They did what they needed to do to get her to say what they wanted her to say."

Mellas claims that one of the policewomen involved in the interrogations, who he says hit his stepdaughter on the head, already faces charges of beating other suspects during previous inquiries. He also claimed that the interpreters made available to Knox were not neutral, which is normal in such cases, but were police officers chosen because they spoke a little English and that they participated actively in the interrogations.

Knox is accused along with her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito of taking part in the murder of Kercher along with Rudy Guede, from the Ivory Coast, who was jailed for 30 years in a separate earlier trial. The prosecution case is that all of them were involved in a sex orgy with Kerecher that ended in tragedy.

Knox and Sollecito have now been in jail for 16 months, with the trial still in its early stages. Mellas claims that though no evidence has been produced to suggest their guilty, both are treated as criminals. "I look at the overall process and I wonder, where is the presumption of innocence?"

He understands that his stepdaughter was jailed, and not given bail, because the Italian authorities were afraid of her leaving the country. "Well, OK so detain her," he said. "But they apply all the rules of the convicted to her. So when I go in I can't take her a pair of socks. Why not?"

Mellas still claims - as did Knox in her early statements - that she spent the night Kercher died with Sollecito at his flat. He is adamant that the alternative story - that she was in the kitchen of the flat she shared with Kercher, closing her ears to her flatmate's screams - emerged only because she was beaten into a confession. "They screwed with Amanda's head so bad that night she didn't know what was right and wrong," said Mellas. "In a statement she wrote the next day she says, 'I don't know much any more, I'm so confused. But I know that I did not kill Meredith.' "

With a total of 150 witnesses to be called, and with hearings held on only two days a week, the trial is expected to last well into the summer.