An Irishman accused of stabbing his best friend to death in a frenzied knife attack in Panama two years ago was found guilty of murder by a Panama jury yesterday.
Peter Byrne, an engineering lecturer from Cork, had pleaded not guilty on grounds of insanity to charges that he killed his childhood friend Max Conroy at Mr Conroy's Panama City apartment in July 1999.
The seven-member jury at Panama's Supreme Court returned a guilty verdict after less than an hour of deliberations.
"The jury found Peter Byrne guilty of murder. He has been returned to the national psychiatric hospital to await sentencing, which could take up to one month," a Supreme Court spokeswoman said.
Byrne flew to Panama to visit Mr Conroy two days before the killing, after attending a conference in the United States. The two men had been friends for more than 20 years.
Lawyers for Byrne entered a defence of insanity, backed by psychiatric testimony that the defendant suffered from acute paranoid psychosis.
In a prosecution statement read to the court, Byrne admitted killing his friend, saying he feared Mr Conroy intended to feed him to an alligator or throw him from a balcony window in the high-rise apartment.
A spokesman for the British embassy in Panama, which is representing Byrne's interests in the absence of an Irish diplomatic mission, said Byrne would be eligible for transfer to Ireland once the court had passed sentence.
"Once he [Byrne] has been sentenced, we can start applying for his transfer to Ireland under the Strasbourg convention for prisoner exchange," Mr Andy Newlands, second secretary at the British embassy, said.
Mr Peter Hawkins, the grandfather of Mr Conroy's five-year-old daughter, attended the trial in Panama.
He said he was pleased with the verdict. "I'm satisfied that justice has been done on behalf of Max. It is the right verdict," Mr Hawkins said.