A court in Rome on Wednesday convicted two Afghans, Mamur and Zar Jan, of the 2001 execution of Italian journalist Maria Grazia Cutuli in Afganistan and sentenced the pair to 24 years in prison.
The court also ordered each of the men to pay 250,000 euros of damages to Cutuli, to her family and to Rcs Media Group, which owns Corriere della Sera, the paper Cutuli was reporting for at the time of her murder.
Cutuli's killers received their convictions via videolink and are currently serving 16 and 18 year jail terms in Afghanistan for the slaying of Cutuli and three other journalists in a roadside ambush 90 kilometres from Kabul.
Rome prosecutors had requested prison terms of 30 years of each of the Jans shooting dead 39-year-old Cutuli with Kalashnikov rifles on the road between Kabul and city of Jalalabad on 19 November 2001.
Julio Fuentes, a reporter with Spanish daily in El Mundo, and two Reuters photoreporters, Australian Harry Burton and Afghan Azizullah Haidari were also killed in the ambush.
Cutuli had been in Afghanistan for a month when she was killed and in the days before her murder had covered the area around Jalalabad and reported on Al-Qaeda hideouts flattened by US bombing raids, according to Corriere della Sera.
