HELSINKI, May 29 (Xinhua) -- A Helsinki court of appeals said on Tuesday it gave a man known as serial strangler a two-and-half-year prison sentence for preparing to strangle a 17-year-old girl.

A lower court had ordered him be released last October for insufficient proof for the same charge.

The case got wide publicity in Finland as the man's neighborhood feared new crimes, but the court system said there was no way of locking him up while the case was being dealt with in the court of appeals. He was then detained in early May as a suspect of another murder elsewhere in Helsinki.

The case has drawn discussion over the problem that Finland has in dealing with criminals prone to commit serious crimes again.

Prisons have to release the criminals upon completion of a verdict and medical care should take over, but quite often there is not enough diagnostic basis.

The man, born in 1965, has been convicted earlier for strangling her mother, another adult woman and a 12-year-girl. Most of his nine other convictions so far have involved strangling.?