A suspect in the murder of a 22-year-old British exchange student here last month refused to answer questions put to him by magistrates on Thursday despite the fact that he had asked to be questioned.
Lawyers for 24-year-old Raffaele Sollecito said later their client did not respond to magistrates' questions because they were the same as those asked at a bail hearing last Friday.
Meredith Kercher was found November 2 with her throat slashed in the house she shared in Perugia with three other girls.
Police later arrested Kercher's 20-year-old American roommate Amanda Marie Knox and Sollectito, her boyfriend. They also arrested Democratic Republic of Congo national Diya 'Patrick' Lumumba, 38, but he was released November 20 after no evidence was found to implicate him in the murder, except testimony by Knox who later retracted her statements.
Lumumba's release coincided with the arrest in Germany of a fourth suspect, 21-year-old Ivory Coast national Rudy Hermann Guede, whose DNA had been found at the scene of the crime and on the victim.
Guede, who was extradited to Italy on Thursday, has admitted being at the scene of the crime but denies any involvement and has said he wants cooperate with investigators.
He reportedly told his father, who visited him in a German prison earlier this week, that he saw Meredith's murderer and that someone else was also there in the house.
According to the Ivory Coast national, the assailant was white and they scuffled before the the murderer fled, shouting to the other person that ''I found that black guy, they'll blame him!''.
''I was so frightened that I ran away,'' Guede told his father.
Last week a preliminary hearings judge denied requests from Knox and Sollecito to be released on bail and ordered that they stay in custody pending their trial.
The motivations for the ruling were made public on Wednesday and gave an insight into the dynamics of the murder, the evidence against the suspects and a portrait of their personalities.
Based on the evidence gathered, the court concluded that Kercher was killed by two or more people, that she knew her killers and that she was held by force while being stabbed several times, once fatally.
Knox was defined as having a ''multi-level personality'' and being ''self-possessed, shrewd, cunning and, at the same time, naive''.
She was also said to have no inhibitions and subject to any impulse, ''even those which could lead to uncontrolled and violent behavior''.
Investigators said Sollecito was ''attracted to violence'' with a ''complex and in certain respects disturbing personality''.
His alibi was dismissed as ''highly unlikely'' because ''irrefutable tests'' on his computer showed that was not working on his thesis in the hours before and after the murder, as he maintains.
