MODENA - Amanda Knox is set to return to Italy for the first time since she was acquitted of charges of the murder of Meredith Kercher and released from prison, despite her vow never to return to the nation.

 ANSA Tuesday disclosed that Knox would be travelling to Milan, and then on to Modena where she will sit on the panel and lead a discussion called "Trial by Media" at the so-called Criminal Justice Festival, an event tackling wrongful convictions and judicial errors organised in part by the Italy Innocence Project. Knox will attend the festival with her mother, Edda Mellas, and her boyfriend. 

 Festival organiser Guido Sola told CNN that he was honoured to have Knox, an "icon of trials that the media carry out before the trial in court is conducted," speaking at the event. "Amanda has been definitively acquitted in court, but in the popular imagination she is stillguilty, because she has been the victim of a barbaric media trial," Sola went on to add.  

 This will be Knox’s first return to Italy since she was released from prison in 2011 after being found guilty of murdering British university exchange student Meredith Kercher, 21 at the time. Kercher was found dead with multiple stab wounds and attention soon fell on Knox, Kercher’s flatmate, and her then boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito. 

 The two were charged with murder but their conviction received widespread criticism internationally as forensic experts criticised the validity of the evidence against them and the decision was overturned but not after the two had spent almost four years in prison.

 Knox and Sollecito were then convicted again in 2014, but this was annulled in 2015 by The Supreme Court of Cassation and Knox has been in the United States since.

ea