Amanda Knox ‘shocked’ by ruling that she will be tried again for murder

Amanda Knox was "shocked" by Italy's Court of Cassation ruling yesterday that she must be retried for the 2007 murder of her roommate Meredith Kercher, ABC News reported.

Knox spent four years in prison before an Italian appeals court threw out her murder conviction in 2011 and she had been hoping the court would uphold the appeals court ruling and end her six year ordeal.

Instead she was told that the marathon legal battle would continue for her and for her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito, who had been convicted along with her.

The court also refused to vacate her conviction for slander over her identifying her employer, Patrick Lumumba, as the person who killed Kercher. It was a statement, she claims, she made under police duress.

"She is shocked and very sad," Knox's lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said. "She thought this was the end of a nightmare."

In a statement Knox said the court's decision was "painful" and "completely unfounded and unfair."

"The prosecution responsible for the many discrepancies in their work must be made to answer for them, for Raffaele's sake, my sake, and most especially for the sake of Meredith's family. Our hearts go out to them," she said.

"No matter what happens, my family and I will face this continuing legal battle as we always have, confident in the truth and with our heads held high in the face of wrongful accusations and unreasonable adversity," she added.

"It's a shocking decision, so we go back to discuss the case and we are ready again," Dalla Vedova said.

Meredith Kercher's family, which had been clearly disappointed when Knox and Sollecito were freed, said they were "happy" by today's ruling, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

The new trial will probably start again next year. Knox will not come back for new trial. Even if she is convicted again, that ruling would be appealed up to the Court of Cassation.

More legal proceedings will be necessary to extradite Knox to Italy. Experts do not believe such an effort would be successful.

Prosecutors and a lawyer for Kercher's family argued that appeals court judges "lost their way" in analyzing the evidence and that Knox and Sollecito should be retried for Kercher's murder. "We feel that Amanda and Raffaele are guilty and were in the room with Rudy Guede," Francesco Maresca, lawyer for the Kercher family, said as he entered the Corte di Cassazione, Italy's supreme court, in Rome.

Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter, has also been convicted in the 2007 murder and is serving a 16-year prison term. Since her 2011 release from prison, Knox has resumed her life in Seattle, taking classes and spending time with her family and boyfriend, James Terrano.