Brazil retries two in slaying of missionary

The 73-year-old nun was shot at close range in February 2005.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) — The confessed killer of Ohio nun Dorothy Stang contradicted earlier testimony, claiming Monday the gun he used did not come from the rancher accused of ordering her murder.

Rayfran Neves Sales confessed to firing six shots at the 73-year-old nun at close range but denied he had received the gun from co-defendant Vitalmiro Moura, said court spokeswomen Gloria Lima by telephone from Belem, the capital of the Amazon state of Para. Sales said the gun was his.

Moura denied any participation in the February 2005 killing, Lima said.

Moura and Sales were convicted in earlier trials and are being retried under provisions of Brazilian law.

In May 2007, Moura was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, but as a first offender sentenced to more than 20 years in prison, he gets an automatic retrial under Brazilian law.

Sales is facing his third trial in the killing. In December, a panel of judges annulled his most recent conviction because two of the jurors had participated in an earlier trial of another defendant in the case. In 2005, Sales had been sentenced to 27 years in prison, a sentence upheld in October and then overturned.

Over the course of three trials and pretrial depositions, Sales has repeatedly changed his testimony, sometimes implicating Moura and at other times seeking to clear him. At his first trial in 2005, Sales stated that he shot Stang after mistaking a Bible she was pulling out of her bag for a gun.

Prosecutors say Sales was offered $25,000 to kill the nun because of a dispute over a patch of jungle that she wanted to preserve and ranchers wanted cut down for development. At his last trial, Sales claimed he was acting in self defense.

An accomplice, a middleman and a rancher also have been convicted in the killing.

Another defendant, rancher Regivaldo Galvao, has so far managed to avoid trial through legal maneuvers before the country’s Supreme Court.

Stang, born in Dayton, Ohio, has evoked comparisons to Chico Mendes, the rain forest defender killed in 1988 in the western Amazon state of Acre.

Human rights defenders say the prosecutions are a key measure of whether those behind land-related killings can be held accountable in Para state, which is plagued by land-related violence.

Land ownership is hard to trace in the Amazon, and powerful ranchers often resort to forged deeds and violence to drive poor settlers away.

The trial before the seven-member jury is expected to end late today.