A court in Georgia on Wednesday sentenced a local shepherd to life in prison for killing a US couple and their four-year-old son in a mountainous region of the country last year.
The court in Georgia's eastern city of Gori delivered the verdict a day after jurors found the shepherd Malkhaz Kobauri guilty of "murder under aggravating circumstances" as well as of rape, the Prosecutor-General's office said in a statement.Kobauri, who was born in 1998, killed Ryan Smith and his four-year-old son with a hunting gun and then raped and drowned his wife Laura Smith in the mountainous Dusheti region in July last year, the statement said.
He was arrested shortly after the killings and has remained in detention since.
Investigators said that Kobauri later retracted a guilty plea he made at the time of his arrest.
The bodies of the Smiths were found by rescuers sent to the Dusheti region of the ex-Soviet country after the authorities received reports the couple had gone missing.
The Smiths had lived in the pro-Western Caucasus nation since 2006 and in 2012 acquired Georgian citizenship.
