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CAPE TOWN, March 26 (AFP) - The leader of the radical South African Muslim viligante group PAGAD was sentenced Tuesday to five years in jail for public violence by the Cape High Court.

The sentence handed down to Abdus-Salaam Ebrahim, the national coordinator of the People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, stems from a protest march in August 1996 when a Cape Town gang boss, Rashaad Staggie, was shot dead and set alight.

A former senior member of the group, Abdur Razaaq Ebrahim, was jailed for three years and another PAGAD member Moegsien Mohammed was sentenced to three years in prison suspended for five years.

The three men and PAGAD's security chief were three weeks ago acquitted of Staggie's murder but Ebrahim also faces trial on a range of other charges, including terrorism for his alleged involvement in a spate of bombings in Cape Town between 1996 and 2000.

Three people were killed and some 130 injured in about 190 blasts in and around the city, which the government has blamed on PAGAD, accusing the movement of trying to destabilise South Africa.

The police cracked down on PAGAD following a bombing on Christmas Eve 1999 in which a policewoman lost her leg, but though it arrested scores of its members convictions initially proved difficult and slow.

In October last year, two PAGAD members were sentenced to 30 years in jail for bombing a police station in Lansdowne outside Cape Town in 1998, becoming the first to be found guilty of one of the blasts.

This followed other lengthy sentences for murder.

The movement was born in 1996 with the stated aim of ridding Cape Town's poor suburbs of drug-dealing gangsters, but its violent methods, including drive-by assassinations, soon put it at odds with the authorities.

It was named as a terrorist organisation by the United States in 1999 and 2001. - Nampa-AFP