Rancher jailed for 30 years over nun's murder

Sister Dorothy Stang was killed in 2005 after standing up for poor peasants and opposing the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.

A court in the port city of Belem found Regivaldo Galvao guilty of ordering the murder of 73-year-old Stang, who was a naturalised Brazilian.

Stang was shot six times in February 2005 as she held her Bible and was left lying in the mud in the town of Anapu in Para, a frontier state where loggers and ranchers have deforested huge swathes of the world's biggest rainforest.

Originally from Ohio, Stang had for more than 20 years helped peasants threatened by loggers and ranchers in Brazil's northern Para state, one of the most devastated by deforestation. Galvao was the last of five defendants to be tried in the Stang case. Last month his accomplice Vitalmiro Moura, also a rancher, was convicted in a retrial to the maximum sentence of 30 years in prison for hiring gunmen to commit the murder.

The much-delayed process of convicting her killers has been widely seen as a test of Brazil's ability to tackle widespread lawlessness in the region.

President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva had called Moura's 2008 acquittal a "stain" on Brazil's image abroad. A retrial was ordered after it was determined that jurors had ignored evidence pointing to Moura's guilt in reaching their verdict.

Stang's murder became a symbol of the often-violent conflicts over natural resources in the vast Amazon region. In the ten years up to 2008, 365 people were murdered in such disputes, according to the Pastoral Land Commission, a watchdog linked to the Roman Catholic Church, which monitors conflicts over land in Brazil.

Gunman Raifran das Neves Sales and his aide Clodoaldo Carlos Batista were sentenced to 27 and 17 years respectively, while a third man, Amair Feijoli da Cunha, was convicted for serving as an intermediary between the gunman and the ranchers. Galvao has five days to lodge an appeal.

The Stang case had received widespread publicity in the United States, partly thanks to a documentary made about her killing narrated by actor Martin Sheen. Stang's order – the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur – has continued its work in the Amazon.