Activist nun's killer released

The man convicted of killing American Amazon activist Sr Dorothy Stang in 2005, has been released from a Brazilian prison after serving less than a third of his sentence, Reuters reports.

The penitentiary system of Pará, the northern state where Stang was murdered, confirmed that confessed killer Rayfran das Neves Sales was released on Tuesday, though they were unable to specify if he was released on parole or into house arrest. He had been sentenced to 27 years in prison.

'In Brazil we have neither the death penalty nor life imprisonment,' a spokeswoman for Cláudio Henrique Lopes Rendeiro, the judge who oversaw Neves' release, said by email. 

'One right afforded to each prisoner, even prisoners of terrible crimes, is the right to re-education,' she said.

Originally from Dayton, Ohio, Sr Dorothy was murdered in 2005 on a dirt road outside the small town of Anapu. She was shot six times in the chest, back and head.

She was 73 at the time of her death and had been working as an advocate for landless peasants in Brazil since 1967. 

She was a fierce critic of cattle ranchers, whom she accused of bullying peasants, seizing land illegally and destroying the rainforest.

'One does wonder how these killers receive such privileged status when we know that many people in the Amazon ... have been murdered with no trial at all,' her brother David Stang said in an email.