Three men guilty of trying to blackmail Michael Schumacher's family

They threatened to release about 1,500 private photos and videos on the dark web - if they were not paid £12.5m.

The trio also threatened to publish digitised copies of Schumacher's medical records.

The 53-year-old ringleader, who had previous convictions, was sentenced to three years in prison at a district court in Wuppertal, western Germany.

His son received a six-month suspended sentence and was fined £1,000.

The third man, a former employee of a security firm hired to protect the Schumacher family home in Switzerland, received a two-year suspended sentence and was fined £2,000 for aiding and abetting the other two men.

Judge Birgit Neubert said the former security worker made the most significant contribution to the crime through breach of trust, dpa news agency reported.

Some 900 pictures and almost 600 videos of the family, plus the medical records were confiscated from the perpetrators, the public prosecutor's office said.

A hard drive remains missing.

Lawyer Thilo Damm, representing the Schumacher family, said they wanted a four-year prison term for the security guard and will appeal.

While the other two defendants made confessions, the security guard's lawyer denied the charges and demanded an acquittal, claiming his client had not stolen the data.

Schumacher, a seven-time Formula One world champion, has not been seen in public since he suffered a serious brain injury in a skiing accident on a family holiday in the French Alps in December 2013.

Last year his family secured £166,000 in compensation from the publisher of a German magazine which printed an AI-generated "interview" with the racing driver.

-SKY NEWS