- guardian.co.uk, Thursday August 31 2000 01.09 BST
The widow of their victim, Mozambique-born Alberto Adriano, stayed away from the hearing at a court in the eastern city of Halle after receiving a death threat.
The court sentenced Enrico Hilprecht, 24, to the maximum of life in prison. His two 16-year-old co-defendants, Christian Richter and Frank Miethbauer, were each given nine years in jail, one year less than the maximum sentence for juveniles.
The judge called the deadly assault on June 11 "the latest in a long chain of attacks to which we must put an end".
Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, called yesterday for the speedy imposition of a ban on the radical far-right National Democratic party of Germany (NPD). The government has moved gradually towards supporting a ban, despite the misgivings of its interior minister, Otto Schily.
Critics, including senior officials in the counter-intelligence service, have argued that such a ban would merely make surveillance of the neo-Nazi scene more difficult.
Mr Schröder will today lay a wreath at a memorial erected at the spot where Adriano was attacked so savagely that he later died of his wounds. The killing was the third this year alleged to have been carried out by members of the far right.
The court was told that the younger defendants had previous convictions for daubing swastikas.
Tolerance of neo-Nazi violence is widespread in eastern Germany, especially among the young. In an effort to end this tolerance, the chancellor yesterday appealed to east Germans' pride in their recent history, encouraging them to take a stand like the one that put an end to communist rule in 1989.
He said Germany needed a "repeat of what people in the east of our country recognised in the peaceful revolution 10 years ago", adding that the easterners had to "involve themselves and fight for the right thing".
In Dessau, where Adriano was killed, police said his German-born widow had received a threatening letter which the public prosecutor's office was investigating. A spokesman for a foreigners' rights group said she had decided not to attend the final session of the court because she was "simply too scared because of her children".
Mr Adriano, who was 39 and worked in a meat packing plant, left behind him three children, of whom the youngest is six months old.
His killers yesterday sat expressionless in court yesterday as the verdict was read out.
The defence had pleaded for shorter jail terms and for manslaughter or deadly assault charges, saying prosecutors had failed to prove that the attackers intended to kill Adriano when they set on him in a park after a drunken rampage through the city.
A defence lawyer, Sabine Grunow, said all of the accused expressed regret in brief closing statements at the end of the four-day trial. Hearings were closed to the public because of German law regarding juveniles.
Adriano was walking home in the early hours of the morning, when the three attacked him, screaming racist abuse. When they had kicked him unconscious, they stripped him of his clothes as a final humiliation.
In a further instance of racist violence, prosecutors in the northern town of Lübeck said they had arrested two skinheads for attacking and injuring a 33-year-old African man whom they had taunted with racial slurs.
Police in the German town of Waiblingen detained two men after two foreigners were slightly injured in an early-morning arson attack on a home for asylum seekers.
Late on Tuesday, a 21-year-old German man was given a five-month suspended sentence and fined 500DM (£160) for punching a Hong Kong-born photojournalist who was trying to cover racism in the east.
