Former boyfriend of Amanda Knox now a TV crime expert

ROME, April 7 (UPI) -- The former boyfriend of Amanda Knox who was acquitted of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy, has been hired as a crime expert by Italian television.

Raffaele Sollecito will make his debut Saturday on the Rome-based TgCom24 network's television program "Il giallo della settimana" ("The Mystery of the Week"), commenting on a 2010 case in which Sarah Scazzi, 15, was murdered in Puglia, Italy.

In 2009, Sollecito and Knox were convicted of the 2007 stabbing death of Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old exchange student from London, in the house Kercher shared with Knox in Perugia, Italy. They were acquitted in 2011 and had their acquittals upheld in higher Italian courts in 2014 and 2015.

"Sollecito was imprisoned, he went through every level of the trial process, so he knows the justice system better than anyone," Paolo Liguori, TgCom24 network director, told the newspaper Corriere della Sera, the British newspaper The Telegraph reported Thursday.. "He will be able to recount his ordeal."

Liguori added that Sollecito was more credible than the "pretty girls" typically hired by Italian reality programs.

"I often ask myself, what experience do they have? How can they graduate at 26 and by the age of 30 be experts in criminology?" he said.

After he was released from prison following the acquittal, Sollecito studied information technology at Verona University, and began an online business called Memories, that lets customers leave messages for dead relatives and pay for their grave site upkeep.

Knox lives in Seattle.