Guede, 34, was sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2008.

Kercher, a 21-year-old student from Coulsdon, Surrey, was murdered in her home in the university town of Perugia in November 2007, just two months after moving to Italy for a study abroad program.

Her body was found in her bedroom, partly undressed with multiple stab wounds.

She had also been sexually assaulted.

The convictions of two other suspects, Amanda Knox, an American student who shared the house with Kercher, and her then-boyfriend, Italian man Raffaele Sollecito, were overturned in 2015.

Guede’s fingerprints were found at the scene along with a palm print in blood belonging to him.

He admitted to having been at the apartment but has always denied killing or sexually assaulting Kercher.

He said he had gone into a “state of shock” after finding her dead upon returning from the bathroom.

Following the murder, Guede fled by train to Germany where he was arrested days later. 

He was charged with murder and sexual assault and handed down a 30-year sentence, which was later cut to 16 years by an appeals court.

The appeals court ruled that the injuries inflicted on Kercher’s body could not have been inflicted by Guede alone.

Guede had already been given partial prison release in 2017 and until the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic had been working in the library of a criminology centre in the Lazio town of Viterbo.

Umbria24 reported that the centre closed because of the pandemic and that Guede then began working as a volunteer for the Catholic charity, Caritas.

Rome’s surveillance court has now entrusted him to social services in what his lawyer, Fabrizio Ballarini, said was a sign of Guede’s “high level of social integration” and “irreproachable conduct”.

Ballarini told Umbria24 that Guede was also completing a master’s in historical sciences at Roma Tre university.

Ballarini said the court’s decision was a “milestone” for Guede, who is “calm and socially well integrated”.

Kercher’s case drew huge media attention.

Knox and Sollecito spent four years in prison after initially being convicted of Kercher’s murder.

For Knox, three of those years was for a defamation conviction received after she wrongly accused Patrick Lumumba, a bar owner, of the crime.

Lumumba spent two weeks in jail and was only released after someone came forward with an alibi for him.