Meredith Kercher's killer Rudy Guede released from prison

Rudy Hermann Guede, the man who killed British student Meredith Kercher in 2007, has been released from prison.

Guede was convicted in 2008 of murdering 21-year-old foreign exchange student Ms Kercher, whose body was found in her bedroom in Perugia, Italy, on November 2, 2007.

Guede has rejected requests for interviews, saying he just wants to be forgotten, Claudio Mariani, a teacher at Viterbo criminological studies centre, where Guede has worked as a librarian, told Ansa news agency.

The Ivorian national was initially sentenced to jail for 30 years, but his jail term was cut to 16 years.

Judges moved his planned January 4 release forward by a few weeks and he was freed on Tuesday, Italian news agencies LaPresse and Ansa quoted attorney Fabrizio Ballarini as saying.

Guede, who has denied killing Ms Kercher, had already been granted permission to leave prison during the day to work.

Ms Kercher, a Leeds University student from Coulsdon in south London, had been in Perugia for three months when she was killed.

She was found with her throat slashed and she had been sexually assaulted, police said.

Guede's bloodstained fingerprints were identified at the scene.

He travelled to Germany in the days after the murder but was extradited back to Italy and was convicted in a fast-track trial, which was held behind closed doors without journalists present.

Meredith Kercher's American flatmate Amanda Knox and Knox's then boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, were separately convicted of Ms Kercher's murder in 2009.

Their arrests and the guilty verdicts generated international media attention. The pair served four years behind bars before those convictions were overturned.

The couple maintained their innocence and were acquitted by Italy’s highest court in 2015.