South Dakota executes man who raped, murdered 9-year old girl

South Dakota prison officials on Tuesday night executed a man convicted of the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl he abducted from a Sioux Falls convenience store in 1990, a state corrections department spokesman said.

Donald Moeller, 60, was pronounced dead at 10:24 pm local time, becoming the second South Dakota inmate put to death by lethal injection this month, but only the fourth executed by the state since 1913, th e department said.

Moeller had professed his innocence and fought for two decades to prevent his execution, but he admitted during a court hearing in early October that he had killed Becky O'Connell and halted appeals that would have further delayed his death sentence from being carried out.

(Reporting by David Bailey; Editing by Steve Gorman)