The mother and father of an American student and her ex Italian boyfriend who are on trial here for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher will take the witness stand on Friday, judicial sources said on Thursday.
Amanda Knox's mother, Edda Mellas, a grade-school teacher in Seattle, will be asked to provide information on a phone call from her daughter shortly after the murder.
Mellas will also be asked to clarify wiretapped conversations with Knox, 21, after her arrest.
Raffaele Sollecito father, Francesco, will be questioned on his son's lifestyle and habits, the sources said.
Knox and Sollecito, 25, are on trial for the murder, on charges of sexual violence as well as for simulating a crime to make it look like an intruder had broken into the house where Kercher and Knox lived.
The American must also answer charges of falsehood for having accused Perugia-based musician Patrick Lumumba of being the murderer.
Prosecutors have cleared Lumumba of any involvement in the case and he is suing for damages.
Exchange student Kercher, 22, was found semi-naked and with her throat slit on November 2, 2007 in the house she shared in Perugia with Seattle-born Knox and two Italian women.
A third defendant, Ivory Coast national Rudy Guede, 21, was sentenced to 30 years for sexually assaulting and murdering the British exchange student at a separate trial last October.
Prosecutor Giuliano Mignini has told the court that Kercher, who was found semi-naked in her bedroom with her throat slashed on November 2, 2007 was killed when Guede, Knox and Sollecito tried to force her to participate in ''a perverse group sex game''.
In Mignini's reconstruction of events, Sollecito and Guede held Kercher's arms while Knox slashed her throat with a kitchen knife.
The public prosecutor said Guede had also tried to rape Kercher.
But Guede's lawyers claim that the crime was carried out by Knox and Sollecito alone.
Guede has always admitted to being in the house on the night of the murder but says he was in the bathroom when Kercher was murdered.
The defendants deny wrongdoing and their defence teams claim their clients were not in the house and that the crime was committed by a single attacker.
Taking the stand in her defence last week, Knox told the court that police had hit her twice during questioning.
''A policeman did this... twice,'' she said, miming two light blows with her hand on her neck.
Explaining why she had falsely accused Lumumba of being the murderer, Knox blamed the pressure of the interrogation, which took place between 5-6 November 2007, three days after the murder.
''I had lots of people around me and someone was shouting. They brought me things but only after I'd made a statement,'' she said. Knox stressed that following the murder, her parents ''wanted me to go home (to Seattle) or to my aunt in Germany but I didn't want to go away''.
Both Knox and Kercher were in Perugia as exchange students.
Knox studied German and Italian at the University of Washington, while Kercher was reading European Studies at the University of Leeds.
