Hildesheim - A court sentenced a 66-year-old German to life imprisonment on Thursday for murdering three neighbours over a long- running garden dispute last September.

The pensioner beat his allotment neighbours to death with a wooden baton, after wrangling for years over garden borders, noise violations, lawnmowing and rubbish.

The court heard that the man - identified under reporting rules only as Wilfried R. - had lain in wait for his neighbours with a cudgel.

He hit the neighbours' 33-year-old son at least ten times with the weapon. The defendant then smashed the skulls of the 59-year-old mother and the 65-year-old father when they attempted to help their son.

The post-mortem report concluded that the accused had knelt on the older man, crushing his neck and ribcage. He then fled the scene, leaving his victims to die an agonizing death.

"I regret having caused this catastrophe from the bottom of my heart," the man had told the court, expressing remorse for the first time in his closing statement. However, he denied being a murderer.

"I would act in the same way again," he insisted, adding that his neighbours were to blame for the years of discord.

The prosecutor had described the man as choleric, pedantic, unforgiving and petty-bourgeois. He had patrolled the garden allotments like a "general," monitoring everybody's moves.

A total of 12 allotment neighbours had been on the receiving end of the pensioner's compulsive personality traits, an expert witness said.

The defendant was fully accountable for his actions at the time of the murders, and was not suffering from a personality disorder, according to the expert. The Hildesheim district court reduced the chance of the man securing early release by emphasizing the severity of his guilt.

The man confessed to the murders in the town of Gifhorn, 60 kilometres east of Hanover, but said they were in self-defence. (dpa)