Meredith Kercher killer Rudy Guede re-arrested over allegations he beat up girlfriend

The only man convicted of brutally killing Meredith Kercher in Italy in 2007 — which went on to become one of the most headline-grabbing murders of the last 20 years — has been re-arrested over allegations he beat up a former girlfriend.

Rudy Guede, 36, was issued a restraining order by an Italian judge Wednesday for allegedly abusing his 23-year-old ex-girlfriend, La Stampa reported.

Prosecutors had initially requested Guede be placed under house arrest, but the judge ruled a 1,600-foot restraining order and an electronic monitoring were sufficient, the outlet added.

Guede was previously sentenced to 30 years behind bars for the vicious stabbing of Kercher, a 21-year-old Leeds University student who was found dead during a year studying abroad in Perugia on Nov. 1, 2007.

The Kercher murder case made international headlines when her roommate, Seattle native Amanda Knox, and her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were arrested by police and named prime suspects in the murder.

Initially, prosecutors argued Kercher’s throat was slashed when she refused to participate in a drug-fueled sex romp with Knox, Sollecito, and Guede, CNN reported.

Sollecito and Knox, now 36, were convicted of Kercher’s murder in December 2009, in a case which wasn’t clear-cut and featured conflicting evidence. The conviction was sucessfullly appealed and they were both eventually acquitted before being convicted again and finally cleared once and for all by Italy’s highest court in 2015.

Both spent around four years in prison over the charges.

Guede was convicted separately of the murder and sexual assault in a separate, fast-tracked trial in October 2008. At that trial it was ruled that two people had participated in killing Kercher and she had been stabbed with two different knives. The second person involved in the murder has never been identified or prosecuted.

Guede’s three-decade sentence was reduced to 16 years on appeal in December 2009, CNN said and he was released for good behavior in November 2021, the outlet said.

“I don’t follow Guede’s life, certainly in light of what happened today it seems to me that he hasn’t changed,” Sollecito told La Stampa Wednesday.

Knox, who recently welcomed her second child with her husband, is now a writer and podcaster and has frequently called on Guede to come clean about what happened on the night her roommate was killed.

“Guede holds a tremendous power to heal others harmed by his actions. He has the power to tell the truth, to take responsibility, to stop blaming me for the rape and murder of Meredith Kercher, which a wealth of evidence shows he committed alone,” Knox wrote on X when the Ivory Coast native was released in 2021.