A COURT in Russia handed down long jail sentences to three homeless men yesterday after they killed and ate a man and sold parts of his body to a kebab stall.

Two men were sentenced to 18 years for murder and desecrating a body, while the third was sentenced to 13 years for murder, a spokesman for Perm regional court in the Urals region told the Interfax news agency.

The men were arrested in November after police found human remains at a bus stop on the outskirts of Perm.

They confessed to investigators that they stabbed the victim and beat him with a hammer.

They then cut up his body and ate part of it, before selling some of it to a kiosk that sold doner kebabs [gyro] and pies.

Investigators who searched the kiosk found no trace of the human remains, an investigator in Perm told Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.

"The meat had already been either cooked or sold," said investigator Sergei Molchanov.

