A court in Brazil has sentenced a rancher to 30 years in prison for ordering the murder in 2005 of US-born nun Dorothy Stang, who lived in the Amazon region and opposed the destruction of the rain forest.
Vitalmiro Moura (39) was given the maximum sentence this evening after the court in the Amazon port city of Belem found him guilty of hiring a gunman to kill the 73-year-old nun, who was opposing him in a land dispute in the rain forest.
Moura had received the same sentence previously but it was overturned in 2008. A retrial was ordered after it was determined that the jury had ignored evidence pointing to Moura's guilt in reaching their verdict.
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had said the decision to release Moura was a "stain" on Brazil's image abroad.
Ms Stang was shot six times in February 2005 and left lying in the mud in the town of Anapu in Para, a frontier state where loggers and ranchers have deforested huge swaths of the world's biggest rain forest.
Regivaldo Galvao, another rancher who is accused of acting as Moura's accomplice in ordering Ms Stang's murder, is due to stand trial from April 30th.
Gunman Raifran das Neves Sales was sentenced in Belem in December 2005 to 27 years imprisonment and another man, Clodoaldo Carlos Batista, was given a 17 year sentence for helping him.
A third man, Amair Feijoli da Cunha, was convicted in 2006 for serving as an intermediary between the gunman and local ranchers.
Reuters