Lula outraged by acquittal in US nun's murder case

BRASILIA, May 8 (Reuters) - Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said on Thursday he was outraged that a rancher convicted of ordering the murder of a U.S.-born nun was acquitted during a retrial.

A jury convicted a man accused of killing Dorothy Stang during a retrial on Tuesday. But it acquitted cattle rancher Vitalmiro Bastos de Moura of charges he ordered the murder in a land dispute in the Amazon rainforest in February 2005.

In a previous trial, Bastos de Moura was convicted and sentenced to a 30-year prison term. Defendants have the right to a retrial for sentences above 20 years.

"As a Brazilian, as a common citizen, I'm obviously outraged with the result," Lula told reporters. He said as president he could not give "hunches" on a court decision.

"I think this testifies a little against Brazil's image abroad. I think it makes part of the society start to have doubts about the trial," Lula told reporters in Brasilia.

"We have to wait until the lawyers make the appeals so we can finally see if the man who ordered it is punished or not."

Edson de Souza, the prosecutor in the case, said on Thursday he ordered the investigation into allegations that a jailed intermediary who hired the gunmen took a bribe from Bastos de Moura to change his initial testimony.

A Catholic land rights group, which worked with Stang, said it was considering taking the case to the Organization of American States.

Stang's brutal murder became a symbol of the often violent conflicts over natural resources in the vast Amazon region. For more than 20 years she helped peasants threatened by loggers and ranchers and opposed the destruction of the rainforest. She was shot six times and left lying in the mud in the town of Anapu in the frontier state of Para. (Reporting by Andrei Khalip and Mauricio Savarese)