Amanda Knox, the American student accused of involvement in the murder of her British flatmate Meredith Kercher in Perugia last November, wrote in her diary that she was only a target in the case because she is attractive.

In hundreds of pages of notes, diary entries, poems, and letters written in her prison cell, released to try to clear her name, Ms Knox protests her innocence over the killing of the South London student.

Ms Knox, her Italian boyfriend Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast immigrant with joint Italian nationality, are being held on suspicion of sexually assaulting Ms Kercher and stabbing her in the throat after she refused to take part in a "sexual game".

Ms Knox - who was accused of acting in a strangely cold and unfeeling manner after the discovery of Ms Kercher's corpse - says she is distressed and angry about the killing, of which she is innocent.

"My friend was killed" she wrote in the diaries. "My roommate, my friend. She was beautiful, intelligent, fun and cared about everyone. Everyone I know is upset about it, but we all have contradictory feelings. We are angry. We want justice."

The notes, which veer in tone from hope to despair, include a list of the seven men she says she slept with in Perugia in the two months before the murder, with details of the sexual encounters.

The Knox family has strongly contested evidence from witnesses that Ms Knox was "a man eater", although friends of Ms Kercher say she repeatedly complained about the number of "strange men" Ms Knox brought back to the whitewashed hillside cottage they shared with two female Italian students.

Ms Knox called herself "Foxy Knoxy", although her family says this derives from her reputation on the sports field and has no sexual connotation.

In her diary and prison extracts, published in Corriere della Sera and written in Italian and English, she refers to her own looks, suggesting she has been singled out for world attention because she is attractive. "If I had been ugly, would they have acted in the same way? I don't think so."

At one stage, Ms Knox admitted to police that she had been present when the murder was committed, but later withdrew this, saying she had made the confession under duress during a late night interrogation with no lawyer present. She said she had not been at the cottage when the crime was committed but spent the night with Mr Sollecito at his flat all night, smoking marijuana.

In her diary Ms Knox writes "I am innocent so I will be free. Free. Free. Free. Freedom. I will have freedom." One poem extract reads "Open your eyes and see that when it is said I am an angel, or a demon, or a lost girl, recognise that what is really lost is: the truth!"

The prison cell dossier also includes love letters to Ms Knox from admirers, with 35 men writing to her in the first two weeks of her incarceration. Some proposed marriage. One man wrote "I love you, marry me. Write to me, because I want to finally know 'the girl with the face of an angel'". Other letters urge her to "have faith in God". In a diary note Ms Knox says she will reply to all letters , "but only when I am out of here".

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