Philadelphia (Mississippi), June 21 (Reuters): Accused Ku Klux Klansman Edgar Ray Killen was found guilty of manslaughter today in the 1964 killings of three civil rights workers, a case that outraged much of the country and energised the civil rights movement.

Killen, 80, had been portrayed by prosecutors as a Ku Klux Klan leader who recruited a mob to kill Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney exactly 41 years ago, on June 21, 1964. The killings in Neshoba County were dramatised in the 1988 movie Mississippi Burning.

The jury found Killen guilty on three counts of felony manslaughter but not guilty of the more serious charge of murder. Killen, who faces up to 20 years in prison, had a tube in his nose, presumably to supply oxygen, as the verdict was read.