An Indian court yesterday cancelled the death sentence handed to a Hindu extremist for the killing of an Australian missionary and his two sons six years ago, and instead ordered life imprisonment, lawyers said.

The high court of the eastern Indian state of Orissa also acquitted 11 people sentenced to a life term by a lower court for burning alive Graham Staines and his two children in a remote village in the state. Judges Sujit Burmon Roy and Laxmikant Mohapatra gave no reason for commuting the death sentence on Dara Singh and the acquittal of the others. The judges retained the life sentence on another man convicted of involvement in the killings in 1999.

“The court only read out the conclusion of the verdict,” S.K. Padhi, lawyer for the prosecution, told Reuters, adding copies of the court order would be available later. A mob attacked Staines and his sons Philip, 10, and Timothy, 6, as they slept in their jeep in a remote village in Orissa. They torched the vehicle and killed all three. Singh pleaded innocent and appealed against the lower court’s decision to hang him and sentence 12 other men to life imprisonment. “It’s a welcome judgement” said his lawyer Bramhananda Panda about Thursday’s decision.

The Staines’ killings followed a wave of attacks on Christians blamed on Hindu radicals fighting conversions, and underscored tension between India’s Hindu majority and religious minorities. Staines’ widow Gladys and her daughter, Esther, stayed on in India after the deaths and opened the Graham Staines Memorial Hospital for lepers in India in 2004 but have since returned to Australia. The widow said she had forgiven the killers.

The Indian government conferred one of its top civilian awards on Gladys Staines in March this year for her work in Orissa. Graham Staines’ brother John Staines told Reuters in Brisbane on Thursday that he had opposed the death penalty for Singh. “I didn’t want to see Dara Singh executed. As far as the others being acquitted, there is one true judge and that is God. No matter what we do in this life if we don’t fulfill the things that God wants us to fulfill, or if we go against his word, then the punishment comes at the end.”