WASHINGTON -  A US Marine Corps drill instructor was sentenced to 10 years in prison for abusing more than a dozen Muslim recruits, one of whom died in 2016, US media reported.

Gunnery Sergeant Joseph Felix was convicted a day earlier of maltreatment of the recruits during their basic training at the Parris Island, South Carolina base.

A jury of eight fellow servicemen and women considered Felix, an Iraq war veteran, the most to blame of six instructors who ordered and participated in extreme hazing of the recruits, taunting them as terrorists.

Two of them were forced into industrial-sized clothes dryers and in one case the machine was turned on when they did not renounce their faith.

One of the recruits of the Pakistani origin, Raheel Siddiqui died after a plunge over a third-storey railing in March 2016 after enduring days of hazing worse than the normal high-pressure treatment given to recruits.

The Marines called his death a suicide. In October, Siddiqui's family sued the Marines for $100 million, saying he was driven by an unnamed superior through a door and onto a balcony where he fell to the ground below.

The sentence decided Friday, which also includes a dishonourable discharge, was harsher than the seven years in prison that prosecutors had recommended. The case will automatically go to appeal per military regulations for judgments that involve lengthy prison sentences and dishonourable discharges.

Sergeant Felix was a central figure in what was found to be a group of abusive drill instructors at Parris Island. After the March 2016 suicide at the base, a hazing investigation led to charges against him, five other drill instructors and the training battalion’s commanding officer. Eleven others faced lesser discipline.

Abusive drill instructors have long been stock characters in books and movies like “Full Metal Jacket.” But that 1987 film was set during the Vietnam War, and the Felix trial shows that since then the Marines have drawn clearer lines between what instructors can and cannot do, said Michael Hanzel, a former Navy lawyer who attended the proceedings at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

“This generation now, there’s things that I think that we’re much more focused on. In particular, in this trial, it’s calling people names based on their religion and targeting people based on their religion,” said Hanzel, now a lawyer in private practice specialising in military law. “I don’t think anyone would say that was acceptable ever, but it probably was not prosecuted in the past the way it would be now.”

The charges against Sergeant Felix included commanding recruits to choke one another; ordering them to drink chocolate milk and then training them until they vomited; and punching recruits in the face or kicking them to the ground.

“He wasn’t making Marines. He was breaking Marines,” Lt-Col John Norman, a prosecutor, told the jury. He called Sergeant Felix a bully who heaped special abuse on three Muslim recruits because of their faith.

One of them, Raheel Siddiqui, 20, a Pakistani-American from Taylor, Mich., hurled himself to his death after what the jury decided was mistreatment by Sergeant Felix that included slapping Mr Siddiqui and calling him a terrorist.

The government did not charge Sergeant Felix with any crime directly related to Mr Siddiqui’s death. The judge, Lt-Col Michael Libretto, did not allow testimony about whether Sergeant Felix’s actions were responsible for the recruit’s suicide.

Sergeant Felix also was convicted of ordering Lance Cpl Ameer Bourmeche into a dryer, which then was turned on as Felix demanded, “Are you still Muslim?” Lance Corporal Bourmeche testified that he twice affirmed his faith and that Sergeant Felix and another drill instructor twice sent him for a bruising, scorching tumble inside the machine.

After a third spin, Lance Corporal Bourmeche said, he feared for his life and renounced his religion. The drill instructors then let him out, he said.

Sergeant Felix was found guilty as well of ordering Lance Corporal Bourmeche to simulate chopping off the head of a fellow Marine while reciting “God is great” in Arabic.

The jury decided Sergeant Felix also ordered Rekan Hawez, a native of Iraqi Kurdistan, to climb into the dryer. The machine was never turned on.

Sergeant Felix was convicted, too, of rousing nearly two dozen recruits from their sleep, ordering them to lie on the floor, and then walking on them along with two other drill instructors.

In a closing statement on Wednesday, Navy Lt Cmdr Daniel Bridges, a defence lawyer, said the government unfairly fashioned contradictory witness accounts into a case against the brawny drill instructor who called all recruits “terrorist”.