Two US tourists given life sentences in Italy for murder of policeman
- Finnegan Lee Elder stabbed Mario Cerciello Rega while on holiday in Rome with his friend Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, who helped hide the murder weapon
- The case scandalised the country and sparked comparisons with the trial of Amanda Knox, a US student convicted and later acquitted of a 2007 murder in Italy

An Italian court convicted two young Americans on Wednesday for the murder of a police officer while they were on a summer holiday in Rome, with both handed life sentences.
Finnegan Lee Elder, 21, had admitted to stabbing Mario Cerciello Rega during a late-night encounter in July 2019, while out with his friend Gabriel Natale-Hjorth, 20.
Prosecutors claimed it was a brutal, unprovoked attack in which Elder, then 19, stabbed Cerciello 11 times with an 18cm (seven inch) camping knife.
The Americans had claimed self-defence, saying they were jumped from behind by men they thought were thugs following an earlier drug deal gone wrong.

Reading out the verdict, Judge Marina Finiti declared the Americans “guilty of the offences ascribed to them jointly” and sentenced them both to “life imprisonment with solitary confinement for a period of two months, in addition to payment of the costs of the trial”. Both were remanded in custody.