Meredith Kercher 'killed by more than one person in sex game gone wrong' The retrial will be held in Florence, probably starting early next year. Miss Knox, who has resumed her studies at Washington University in Seattle, is not expected to return to Italy to attend. The judges said she should be held to account for the fact that she wrongly accused an innocent man of the murder. Patrick Lumumba, a Congolese barman who lives and works in Perugia, spent time in jail before being released after producing a credible alibi for the night of the murder. "Even though she was young, Miss Knox was a mature girl, born and raised in a country where one is not allowed to wrongly accuse another person to free oneself from a difficult situation," the judges wrote. The Supreme Court judges leant support to the prosecution, who insisted in the original trial that Miss Knox, Mr Sollecito, and Guede, a local drifter and small-time drug dealer, submitted Miss Kercher to a violent sex game, eventually killing her by stabbing her in the throat. Miss Kercher, from Surrey, who was studying at Perugia's University for Foreigners for a year, was found dead in the house she shared with Miss Knox and two Italian women in Nov 2007. Miss Knox and Mr Sollecito were found guilty of her sexual assault and murder at a trial in 2009 but later acquitted on appeal. Those appeals were in turn overturned by the Supreme Court, which ordered the retrial. The Supreme Court said there had been "shortcomings and contradictions" in the lower appeal court's decision to acquit the former lovers. Guede, who was born in Ivory Coast but brought to Italy as a child, was found guilty of sexually assaulting and murdering Miss Kercher in a separate trial and condemned to 30 years in prison - a sentence later reduced to 16 years on appeal. Miss Knox and Mr Sollecito continue to insist that they had nothing to do with the killing of the British student. "If there was an erotic game, most certainly Raffaele Sollecito and Amanda Knox were not part of it," Mr Sollecito's lawyer, Giulia Bongiorno said. She said her client had nothing to fear from a retrial because he was innocent. The new trial would "only bring out the strangeness of...the allegations," she said.