Two years after the fatal shooting of black US jogger Ahmaud Arbery, the perpetrators have been found guilty of a racially motivated hate crime in a second trial.

A federal jury in Brunswick, Georgia, ruled Tuesday that the three white men had hunted Arbery because of his skin color.

The sentence will be announced at a later date.

24-year-old gunman Travis McMichael, his father Gregory and their neighbor William Bryan were sentenced to life imprisonment in January for Arbery's murder.

In the subsequent second trial at the federal level, the focus - unlike the first trial at the state level of Georgia - was on an alleged racist motivation of the perpetrators.

Such double procedures are rare in the United States, but possible.

attack on civil rights

The federal judiciary argued that the three men targeted Arbery because of his skin color, committing a hate crime.

"None of this would have happened if Ahmaud had been white," prosecutor Bobbi Bernstein said at the start of the trial last week.

The indictment specifically charged the three men with an assault on Arbery's civil rights and attempted kidnapping.

The McMichaels were also charged with using a gun in the commission of a crime.

The guilty verdicts now come exactly one day before the second anniversary of Arbery's death.

The three white men had followed the jogging Arbery with two cars on February 23, 2020 in a suburb of the city of Brunswick because they mistook him for a burglar.

In a scuffle that followed, Travis McMichael, who was armed with a rifle, shot the 25-year-old unarmed African American man.

A special symbolic meaning

The case only became public two and a half months later with the release of a cell phone video of the chase and Arbery's death.

The recordings caused outrage across the country.

Arbery became a symbol of the Black Lives Matter protests against racism in the United States, along with blacks George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, who were killed by police officers.

The guilty verdicts in the federal trial have a special symbolic meaning: Arbery's family had insisted that the racist dimension of the crime be clearly recorded.

In the first trial, the prosecution largely avoided raising the issue of racism, concentrating on the course of events rather than a possible motivation of the perpetrators.

The McMichaels are serving life sentences without parole.

Her neighbor was sentenced to life imprisonment with the possibility of parole.