Appeals judges have upheld an 18-year jail sentence imposed on an animal-rights activist who murdered Dutch populist politician Pim Fortuyn last year.
Volkert van der Graaf (34) was sentenced in April for shooting the controversial Mr Fortuyn just days before a May 2002 election that swept the politician's novice party into a short-lived government.
The appeals judges considered that Van der Graaf suffered from a "compulsive obsessive disorder" but that this did not diminish his responsibility.
Both prosecution and defence had appealed. The public prosecutor called for life imprisonment. Van der Graaf's lawyers argued that the sentence took insufficient account of his pre-trial detention conditions and of negative comments by politicians before the case came to trial.
The point-blank shooting of Mr Fortuyn (54) outside a radio station near Amsterdam was The Netherlands's first political assassination in more than three centuries.
Van der Graaf confessed to the crime, telling the trial he viewed the outspoken, anti-immigration politician as a danger to democracy.