A Swedish court has given a disgraced Italian surgeon a suspended sentence for causing bodily harm during an experimental stem-cell windpipe transplant.

Paolo Macchiarini, once seen as a pioneering transplant surgeon, was cleared of two charges of assault.

Three patients treated in Sweden died.

Prosecutors had recommended Macchiarini serve five years in jail but the district court ruled that he had not intended to cause the patients harm.

He consistently denied the charges.

Macchiarini was feted internationally in 2011 for carrying out the world's first synthetic organ transplant at Sweden's Karolinska University Hospital. His work using plastic tracheas with stem cells held out the prospect of patients no longer waiting for donors.

He had been hired a year earlier from Italy, despite damning references from his previous employers.

Andemariam Beyene, a graduate student from Eritrea who received the first transplant in 2011, died two and a half years later after a series of infections. His synthetic trachea was found to have come loose. Shortly after the operation he told the BBC: "I was very scared, very scared about the operation. But it was live or die."