Meredith Kercher murder: Raffaele Sollecito loses £400,000 compensation bid for wrongful conviction

Raffaele Sollecito, who was acquitted on appeal of the 2007 murder of British student Meredith Kercher after spending four years in jail, has lost his bid for €500,000 (£426,000) in compensation.

Sollecito had claimed the maximum possible compensation sum after being wrongly jailed for the murder of the Kercher, who was found stabbed to death in a flat in Perugia where she had been studying on a university Erasmus programme.

Sollecito and his girlfriend, US student Amanda Knox, were found guilty of the murder and each spent four years in prison. They were each acquitted in 2015, when an Italy's highest court found there was no biological evidence linking them to the crime.

Sollecito said the protracted ordeal had cost his family €400,000. However an appeals court in Florence found that Sollecito has made contradictory and misleading claims in his early statements to police, thus rendering his claim invalid.

Writing on Facebook after the latest court decision, Sollecito said: "I thought I had lived through the darkest pages of the Italian justice system, but despite being declared innocent by the supreme court, I must acknowledge that my harsh detention was justified."

Sollecito's legal team said that they would appeal the decision, and said the appeal court had failed to take into account that Sollecito's early statements were made under duress.