Source: CathNews
A Brazilian court has sentenced a rancher to 30 years for ordering the killing of the environmental activist American nun, Sr Dorothy Stang.Jurors in Belem found Vitalmiro Bastos Moura guilty after 15 hours of deliberations, the New York Times reports.
Prosecutors said Moura ordered her killing in 2005 because she blocked him from taking land the government gave to farmers.
Moura was sentenced to 38 years in jail at a first trial in 2007, but acquitted on retrial the following year, BBC News notes.
Ms Stang, who was 73 when she was killed, worked in the Amazon for 30 years to preserve the rainforest and protect the rights of rural workers against large-scale farmers wanting to take their land.
She was shot dead as she walked along a muddy rainforest track in the town of Anapu in Para, a northern frontier state where loggers and ranchers have deforested huge tracts of rainforest.
The two confessed hitmen who killed her said Moura and another rancher, still to be tried, had paid them to do it.
Speaking from Belém, Sister Dorothy's brother, David Stang, told The Independent: "[Moura] has already appealed this trial. However, he is in jail, he will not be freed for the appeal and he has now twice been convicted. These are real things. The other important thing is that this story continues to grow."
Rebeca Spires, a nun who has worked in Brazil for 40 years and who knew Sister Dorothy for 35 of them, told reporters: "We've waited so long for this verdict. This conviction sends a strong message to the other masterminds that the impunity is ending."