Raffaele Sollecito 'picked up on border' after guilty conviction

RAFFAELE SOLLECITO, the former boyfriend of Amanda Knox, has reportedly been picked up on the Italian border hours after his conviction for murder was reinstated.

The Florence court of appeal last night upheld guilty verdicts against Knox and Sollecito for the murder of Meredith Kercher in 2007. While Knox was left wondering if she would be extradited from America to serve her sentence, Sollecito was already within Italian jurisdiction facing 25 years in prison.

Today, he was found by flying squad police officers "very close" to the Italian border with Austria and Slovenia, reports the Daily Telegraph. He was said to be in a village between the north-eastern city of Udine and the town of Tarvisio – around four-and-a-half hours' drive from Florence.

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It is not clear if he was intending to cross the border into Austria or Slovenia.

Immediately after reinstating the conviction last night, the judge in the retrial ordered that Sollecito's passport and identity card should be confiscated. However, Sollecito had already left the court room.

Earlier in the day, he made a "rather grand entrance", walking "confidently past reporters in dark glasses and refusing to stop to answer questions", reported the Telegraph.

His lawyer even told reporters: "He has decided to face the situation. He is afraid of nothing, and his presence is a silent scream of innocence."

But at around 7pm, the lawyer said his client was "stressed" and would not come to the court room to hear the verdict, despite earlier pledging to be there with his father.

Sollecito is now understood to be in a police station in Udine and has had his passport and papers taken away.

The court ordered his documents to be confiscated because it was judged he had links in other countries. Earlier in the week, an ex-girlfriend based in the US alleged that he had proposed to her and Knox in a bid to obtain US citizenship and avoid a potential prison sentence in Italy. Kelsey Kay, from Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, claims he proposed to Knox in March 2013, six years after the murder of Kercher.