Raffaele Sollecito: Amanda Knox's ex-boyfriend becomes TV crime expert for Berlusconi channel

A year after he was acquitted of murdering British student Meredith Kercher, Amanda Knox's ex-boyfriend has joined an Italian crime show as a pundit. Raffaele Sollecito is to appear as a crime expert on Il Giallo della Settimana (This Week's Mystery), a weekly broadcast on unsolved murders and other crimes aired by a channel owned by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Paul Liguori, the editor of TgCom24, the news channel airing the show, said: "Sollecito was decisively acquitted by the Court of Cassation, he spent time in prison and faced all rounds of appeal. He knows the machine of justice better than all of us and he will be able to tell us of his ordeals".

The decision caused some controversy in Italy, where despite the double acquittal, part of the public remains unconvinced of Sollecito and Knox's innocence. They were first arrested in November 2007 days after Kercher's body was found with her throat slashed inside the apartment she shared with Knox in the university town of Perugia, central Italy.

Sentenced to 26 and 25 years respectively in 2009, they remained in jail up to October 2011, when the verdict was reversed on appeal. After a series of overturns that polarised public opinion, Italy's top court finally put an end to a long legal odyssey in March 2015, acquitting the pair after 10 hours of legal discussions, ruling that they did not commit the crime.

Sollecito has since been fighting to rehabilitate his name, defending his right to a new life. He has spoken about justice failures at political meetings and separately set up an internet company to commemorate dead people.

"I am one of the few that made it and I fight so that what happened to me will not happen to anyone else," he wrote in a Facebook comment responding to criticism over his impending participation to the TV show.