Suppose first that complete convergence holds. For each positive integer , apply the First Borel-Cantelli lemma to . Outside a countable union of null events, only finitely many of these exceedances occur for every . This is almost sure convergence, with no independence assumption.
For the converse, an important point is that independence of does not immediately imply independence of . Instead use the fact that an almost-sure limit of independent random variables is constant. Indeed, is measurable for the tail sigma-algebra. The Kolmogorov zero-one law makes each event , , have probability zero or one. Since almost surely and is finite, these probabilities form the distribution function of a point mass: there is a finite constant with almost surely.
Now are independent events. Almost sure convergence says that their infinitely-often event has probability zero. The contrapositive of the Second Borel-Cantelli lemma gives
Replacing by the almost surely equal leaves each probability unchanged. Thus complete convergence and almost sure convergence are equivalent for independent sequences.