Peter Tobin was this afternoon sentenced to life in jail with a minimum of 30 years after being found guilty of murdering Scottish schoolgirl Vicky Hamilton.

The jury at the High Court in Dundee took less than two-and-a-half hours to find Tobin guilty. As the verdict was delivered, there were cries of "Yes" from members of Vicky's family and friends.

Her father Michael smiled broadly as Tobin was found guilty and Vicky's younger sister Lindsay Brown, speaking outside the court, thanked police and said: "Justice has prevailed today."

Vicky's father also shouted "rot in hell" as Tobin was given a life sentence and told he would be 92 years old before he would be considered for release. Judge Lord Emslie told the killer today: "Abducting and killing a child on her way home from a happy weekend with her sister and then desecrating her body must rank among the most evil and horrific acts that any human being could commit."

Tobin, 62, had denied abducting and murdering Vicky more than 17 years ago and burying her body parts.

Vicky was killed February 1991 after Tobin snatched her from a street in Bathgate, West Lothian, where she was looking for a bus to take her home to Redding, Falkirk.

After Vicky was taken to Mr Tobin's then home in Bathgate she was drugged and sexually assaulted.

Tobin then tried to cover up the murder by, among other things, cutting Vicky in two and burying her.

The teenager's mutilated corpse was dug from a makeshift grave at a house in Margate, Kent, where Tobin also lived.

As he started his summing up speech today, Lord Emslie said: "This is a sad and harrowing case about a teenager who disappeared without trace from Central Scotland in 1991 and whose body then turned up in a garden grave 400 miles away in Kent last year.

"As human beings out hearts go out to Vicky Hamilton and her family in their anguish and we may also harbour feelings of rage against whoever was responsible."

Tobin had claimed he was in the Portsmouth area when Vicky disappeared.

The trial saw video of an interview with detectives in Fraserburgh (incorrectly captioned Frazerburgh in the police video) where he denied ever meeting Vicky. But Tobin did not give evidence during the trial.

During the trial, prosecutor Frank Mulholland QC, Scotland's solicitor-general, described Vicky's murder as a crime of "almost unspeakable horror".

Branding the killing "a barbaric act" and an "atrocity", he told the jury: "I have searched long and hard in my lexicon to find words which can properly describe what happened to this poor girl.

"The best I can do is describe it as 'evil'."

Over the 21 days of the trial, the court heard Vicky's remains were unearthed by police in a shallow grave in the back garden of Tobin's former home at 50 Irvine Drive, Margate, Kent, in November last year.

Her bisected body - badly decomposed by that stage - had been wrapped in layers of plastic bin bags "like a Russian doll" and dumped 3ft beneath the surface, under a layer of concrete.

The discovery came after the schoolgirl's family endured a 17-year nightmare, forced to wonder every day what had happened to their daughter and sister.

Vicky's mother died 'of a broken heart' two years after she vanished.

Vicky was waiting for a bus in Bathgate on the snowy evening of February 10, 1991.

The schoolgirl was waiting for a bus in the town centre to take her home to her mother in Redding, near Falkirk, after visiting her sister Sharon in Livingston, West Lothian.

The 15-year-old was said to have been nervous about the journey as it was the first time she had ever visited her sister on her own.

Tobin preyed upon her nervousness and lured her to his home at 11 Robertson Avenue, Bathgate.

There, or somewhere else, he drugged her with the sedative Amitriptyline, strangled her, carried out a serious sex attack and murdered her.

Experts told the trial that bruising found on her body suggested she met a violent death.

Bruises on the 15-year-old's hand suggested she fought bravely for her life, despite being sedated.

The killer then set about covering his tracks by hiding Vicky's body and getting rid of some of her clothing and personal belongings.

He cut her body in two, wrapped it in a curtain and bin bags, and stashed the knife in the loft of Robertson Avenue.

Tobin left the schoolgirl's purse near Edinburgh's main railway and bus stations to fool police into thinking she had run away from home.

The following month, he moved to Margate, taking the schoolgirl's body with him in his van.

It was there, in his own back garden, that he buried Vicky's body, hundreds of miles away from her family.

Yet when police confronted Tobin with damning DNA evidence against him in July last year, he insisted he had never met Vicky and refused to help officers find her body.