RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- The men accused of killing a U.S. nun in the Amazon rainforest will not face trial before December or next year at the earliest, a state prosecutor said Thursday.Prosecutor Lauro Freitas said appeals by two of the five men accused in the killing of 73-year-old Dorothy Stang on February 12 were delaying the trial.Stang, born in Dayton, Ohio, spent the last 30 years of her life defending poor settlers in the Amazon rainforest. She was shot near the jungle town of Anapu in a dispute over a patch of forest that a local rancher wanted to cut down.Her killing evoked comparisons with rainforest defender Chico Mendes, who was killed in 1988 in the western Amazon state of Acre.On Wednesday, a Para state court rejected an appeal by Vitalmiro Moura and Regivaldo Galvao, two ranchers accused of ordering the killing, claiming there was insufficient evidence linking them to the crime.The other suspects include two alleged gunmen, and another man who police said was an intermediary between the gunmen and the ranchers. All have been charged with homicide and face between 12 and 30 years in prison if convicted.Court officials had said in July that the trial would go ahead in October. David Stang, the victim's brother, visited Brazil in September to press authorities to end delays in bringing his sister's killers to trial."We asked for three things: that the pistoleiros and the ranchers be tried together, that (the trial) be in Belem and that it not stop just with those five people -- that there be a wider investigation," Stang told The Associated Press at the time.Freitas said it still remained unclear whether all five defendants would be tried together.Shortly after Dorothy Stang's killing, a report compiled by a Senate commission found evidence of a wider conspiracy behind her slaying, but little has been done to investigate those allegations.In June, federal courts declined to hear the case, despite a 2004 Brazil law that brought human rights abuses under federal jurisdiction. Stang's family and human rights groups like Amnesty International have condemned the decision saying it leaves the killers to face trial in the notoriously corrupt courts of Para state, in the eastern Amazon.Para state courts have granted the motion to move the trial from the remote eastern Amazon town of Pacaja, about 1,250 miles (2011 kilometers) northwest of Rio de Janeiro, to the state capital, Belem.In June, a U.S. grand jury indicted two of the Brazilian suspects, Rayfran das Neves Sales, 28, and Clodoaldo Carlos Batista, 30 for murder, for conspiracy to murder an American citizen outside the United States, and for using a firearm in commission of their alleged crime. It was unclear if the United States would seek to extradite them.Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.