- "I still have to fight," Raffaele Sollecito tells CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360"
- Sollecito and ex-girlfriend Amanda Knox convicted a second time in Italian courts
- Knox's roommate, Meredith Kercher, was killed in 2007
(CNN) -- The ex-boyfriend of American exchange student Amanda Knox says he has returned to Italy to fight his new murder conviction in the death of Knox's onetime roommate, Meredith Kercher.
In a CNN interview Monday evening, Raffaele Sollecito said he and his current girlfriend were in neighboring Austria, preparing to celebrate what he had expected to be his exoneration by an Italian court. Instead, that court found Knox and Sollecito guilty for a second time last week, sentencing him to 25 years.
Knox, who returned to the United States after her 2009 conviction was overturned, said last week that she "will never go willingly" back to Italy. But Sollecito said he came back "as soon as I understood the verdict."
"I'm trying to be as positive as possible in a situation like this," he said. "It's very traumatic, the situation here now. But on the other side, I still have to fight. I have chosen to be here and to fight against this ordeal."
Appeals Court Judge Alessandro Nencini, center, reads out the verdict for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Florence, Italy, on Thursday, January 30, 2014. The appeals court upheld the convictions of U.S. student Amanda Knox and her ex-boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito for the 2007 murder of her British roommate. Knox was sentenced to 28 1/2 years in prison, raising the specter of a long legal battle over her extradition. Sollecito's sentence was 25 years. 
Sollecito, left, and his father Francesco leave after attending the final hearing before the verdict on January 30. After nearly 12 hours of deliberation, the court reinstated the guilty verdict first handed down against Knox and Sollecito in 2009. 
Patrick Lumumba, the Congolese bartender Knox originally accused of Kercher's murder, talks to the press outside the courthouse during a break form the appeal trial of Knox and Sollecito on September 30. 
Knox appears on NBC's "Today" show. Knox spent four years in jail because of murder charges in the death of her roommate Meredith Kercher while studying abroad in Perugia, Italy. 
Knox and her former boyfriend Sollecito were convicted in 2009 to 25 years in prison (Sollecito got 26 years). The conviction was overturned in 2011 for "lack of evidence." But Italy's Supreme Court decided last year to retry the case, saying the jury that acquitted them didn't consider all the evidence and that discrepancies in testimony needed to be answered. 
Meredith Kercher, a 21-year-old British exchange student, was found dead with her throat slit in an apartment she shared with Knox on November 2, 2007. 
When Knox was detained for questioning in 2007, she implicated Lumumba, the owner of a bar where Knox worked. Lumumba was taken into custody and released after two weeks in prison when his alibi was corroborated. He later won a libel suit against Knox. 
Sollecito, Knox's boyfriend at the time of the murder, was convicted in December 2009 with Knox and released when their cases were overturned. Prosecutors testified that police scientists found Sollecito's genetic material on a bra clasp of Kercher's found in her room, while his defense claimed there wasn't enough DNA for a positive ID. 
Rudy Hermann Guede, an Ivory Coast native raised in Perugia, was convicted separately from Knox and Sollecito and is now serving 16 years. Guede admitted to being with Kercher on the night she died, but said he didn't kill her. Both Knox and Sollecito argued that he was the killer, and Guede suggested the couple took Kercher's life. 
Meredith Kercher's family lawyer Francesco Maresca, left, argued in court in 2011 that the multiple stab wounds implied more than one aggressor killed Kercher. Pictured from left are Maresca, Kercher's father John, sister Stephanie, brother Lyle and brother John at a press conference in 2008. 
Carlo Dalla Vedova, one lawyer on Knox's defense team, argued in court that "the only possible decision to take is that of absolving Amanda Knox" in his closing argument for her appeal hearing. 
Carlo Pacelli represented Patrick Lumumba in his civil suit case. He called Knox two-faced and a "she-devil." 
Giulia Bongiorno, the lead lawyer on Raffaele Sollecito's defense team, compared Knox to Jessica Rabbit on the movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" Knox is not bad, just "drawn that way," Bongiorno said in her closing statements in the 2011 trial. The Knox-Sollecito retrial
The Knox-Sollecito retrial
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Photos: The Knox-Sollecito retrial 
Guilty...once again Italian police said Sollecito was stopped in the northern Italian town of Udine, near the border with Austria and Slovenia.
In an interview on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360," Sollecito said he thought his relationship with Knox hurt him.
"Why do they convict me?" he said. "Why do put me on the corner and say that I'm guilty just because in their minds I have to be guilty because I was her boyfriend. It doesn't make any sense to me."
Kercher, 21, of Great Britain, was found stabbed to death in 2007 in the house she shared with Knox in Perugia, where both women were exchange students. Prosecutors said Kercher was killed after she rejected attempts by Knox, Sollecito and another man, Ivory Coast-born Rudy Guede, to involve her in a sex game.
Guede is the only person in jail for the murder, and many aspects of the crime still remain unexplained.
Both Knox and Sollecito have maintained their innocence, and their 2009 convictions led to questions about the effectiveness of Italy's justice system. The trial revealed widespread doubts over the handling of the investigation and key pieces of evidence, and the convictions were overturned on appeal in 2011.
But in March 2013, Italy's Supreme Court overturned the pair's acquittals and ordered a retrial. That proceeding resulted in the convictions being reinstated on Thursday.
"I don't know what to think, because objectively, there's nothing against me and nothing very strong against Amanda," Sollecito said.
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