VATICAN CITY — A Vatican court has convicted a Holy See computer technician of helping the former papal butler in the theft of confidential papal documents, and given him a two-month suspended sentence.

Claudio Sciarpelletti, an Italian who is a computer program analyst in the Vatican's Secretariat of State, had testified earlier Saturday that he had played no role in helping to spirit out confidential documents in a scandal involving alleged corruption in the Vatican bureaucracy.

The Pope's former butler, Paolo Gabriele, was convicted last month in a separate trial for the theft of the documents and is serving a 18-month prison sentence in Vatican City.

A pool of eight journalists was chosen to cover the proceedings, which begn Saturday morning.

The stolen documents formed the basis of an Italian journalist's book about alleged corruption at the Vatican.