After months in a Rome jail, two friends from California went on trial Wednesday, accused of murdering an Italian policeman during a summer vacation in Italy.
Both defendants have said they thought they were being attacked and acted in self-defense.
According to judicial documents from early in the case, Natale-Hjorth claimed he didn’t know his friend had the knife. Prosecutors contend that after the stabbing, Natale-Hjorth hid the knife behind a panel in the ceiling of the hotel room the young men were sharing. Both defendants have told Italian investigators they were swindled while trying to buy cocaine in Trastevere. Police and prosecutors have said after they handed over money, they grabbed the knapsack of the drug dealer’s intermediary. The go-between, apparently a Carabinieri informant, later called police to report that his bag with his cell phone was snatched.
One apparent line of defense has been that the Americans believed that drug dealers had come to the rendezvous instead of the go-between, and didn’t realize that police had shown up to handle the matter.
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