Who stabbed Sirhan Sirhan, and by the way who killed Bobby Kennedy?
SAN DIEGO, California – Sirhan Sirhan, the man alleged to have assassinated Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968 continues to recover in hospital after being stabbed by a fellow inmate on Friday.
Sirhan, a Christian, was convicted of slaying Kennedy, however there is considerable evidence that he was not responsible for the late attorney general’s death.
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation issued a statement late Friday indicating a prisoner at the Richard J Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego, had been stabbed and said “officers responded quickly” to the attack.
The statement said the victim of the stabbing was in stable condition.
Sirhan was originally sentenced to death but that sentence was later commuted to life in prison after Sirhan agreed, on his lawyer Grant Cooper’s advice, to admit to the shooting, even though he did not remember it. Cooper, who was widely criticised for this tactic, and for not investigating the crime, had offered the jury the concession to sway the jury from recommending the death sentence for his client.
Sirhan, an exercise boy at racetracks and a stock clerk and delivery boy at a health food store, at the time, and to this day, says he has no recollection of shooting Kennedy, and was badly advised by his legal counsel.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest Sirhan did not fire the fatal shot.
Kennedy was shot at point-blank range from behind, the bullet piercing just below his ear. The autopsy performed by Chief Medical Examiner-Coroner Thomas Noguchi concluded the gun had been fired no more than one or 2 inches from Kennedy. Sirhan, however, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant on a Jordanian passport, was standing several feet in front of him and shooting indiscriminately.
Another problem for Sirhan’s legal team was that they were only provided with the autopsy report well into the trial.
Just as there is significant doubt about the killer of his brother John Kennedy in Dallas, Texas in 1963, Robert Kennedy’s death too has been clouded with speculation.
It has been suggested Sirhan may have been subjected to coercive hypnosis, in a real-life version of “The Manchurian Candidate.” Several witnesses said he was in a trance-like state. It is known that well into the 1960s the CIA had a project in operation that was in full experimentation mode whereby individuals were being hypnotised and instructed to carry out actions in a waking state, and to say things that would be compatible with the actions they were instructed to undertake.
Other evidence to throw doubt on Sirhan’s role in the assassination is that a number of witnesses swore that up to 13 shots were fired at the time, when Sirhan’s gun only held eight bullets.
Robert Kennedy Jnr., a lawyer, who was just 14 when his father was assassinated, says he harbours doubts about Sirhan’s guilt. He recently visited him in prison.
“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” he told The Washington Post. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father. My father was the chief law enforcement officer in this country. I think it would have disturbed him if somebody was put in jail for a crime they didn’t commit.”
Kennedy has called for a reinvestigation of the assassination.
His sister, former Maryland lieutenant governor Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, is now expressing doubts, too. “Bobby makes a compelling case,” she told The Washington Post. “I think the investigation should be reopened.”
Paul Schrade, who was in the Kennedy entourage and who was shot while walking behind him still remembers the night. “He immediately started shaking hands,” with kitchen workers, he said of Kennedy. “The TV lights went on. I got hit. I didn’t know I was hit. I was shaking violently, and I fell. Then Bob fell. I saw flashes and heard crackling. The crackling actually was all the other bullets being fired.”
Witnesses reported that Kennedy said, “Is everybody okay? Is Paul all right?”
Schrade when he recovered tried to set the record straight. Since 1974 he has been trying to get the case reopened. “Yes, he did shoot me. Yes, he shot four other people and aimed at Kennedy,” Schrade said in an interview with The Washington Post. “The important thing is he did not shoot Robert Kennedy. Why didn’t they go after the second gunman? They knew about him right away. They didn’t want to know who it was. They wanted a quickie.”
“I’m interested in finding out how the prosecutor convicted Sirhan with no evidence, knowing there was a second gunman,” Schrade said.
As with Lee Harvey Oswald, everything was down pat for the LAPD when Kennedy went down. Sirhan confessed to the killing at trial (he claims this was done on his lawyer’s instruction). He took hours of target practice with his pistol earlier in the day, and he had the gun with him when he went into the Ambassador Hotel that night. He had been seen at a Kennedy speech at the Ambassador two days earlier. He had a newspaper clipping critical of Kennedy in his pocket and had written “RFK must die” repetitively in notebooks found at his home, none of which he had any recollection of. And he waited in the pantry for about 30 minutes, according to witnesses who said he asked if Kennedy would be coming through there. With five wounded victims, and Kennedy having been shot 3 times, that accounted for the eight bullets in Sirhan’s gun. Game, set and match.
Witnesses however said bullet holes were found in the door frames of the Ambassador Hotel’s pantry, and photos showed investigators examining the holes in the hours after the shooting. This would imply there was a second shooter. Lead crime scene investigator DeWayne Wolfer said at the time the holes were not bullet holes, and the doors had since been destroyed.
“Though Los Angeles authorities had promised transparency in the case, the police and prosecutors refused to release their files until 1988, when they produced a flood of new evidence for researchers,” The Washington Post said in its report.
“Among the material was an audiotape, first unearthed by CNN journalist Brad Johnson, which had been inadvertently made by Polish journalist Stanislaw Pruszynski in the Ambassador Hotel’s ballroom, and turned over to police in 1969.”
“Pruszynski’s microphone had been on the podium where Kennedy spoke, and TV footage shows him detaching it and moving toward the pantry as the shooting happens,” the Post report says.
“In 2005, audio engineer Philip Van Praag said the tape revealed that about 13 shots had been fired. He said he used technology similar to that of the ShotSpotter used by police to alert them to gunshots, and which differentiates gunshots from firecrackers or other loud bangs.”
Van Praag said mid-last year that different guns create different resonances and that he was able to establish that two guns were fired, that they fired in different directions, and that some of the shot “impulses” were so close together they couldn’t have been fired by the same gun. He said he could not say “precisely” 13 shots but certainly more than the eight contained by Sirhan’s gun,” said The Washington Post report.
“There were too many bullets,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said. “You can’t fire 13 shots out of an eight-shot gun.”
He described Sirhan’s trial as “really a penalty hearing. It wasn’t a real trial. At a full trial, they would have litigated his guilt or innocence. I think it’s unfortunate that the case never went to a full trial because that would have compelled the press and prosecutors to focus on the glaring discrepancies in the narrative that Sirhan fired the shots that killed my father.”
Kennedy told the Post he was asleep in his dorm at Georgetown Preparatory School in Bethesda, Md., on June 5, 1968, when a priest woke him and told there was a car waiting outside to take him to the family home, Hickory Hill, in McLean, Va. The priest didn’t say why.
In his memoir, “American Values: Lessons I Learned from My Family,” Kennedy said his mother’s secretary was waiting for him. “Jinx Hack told me my father had been shot, but I was still thinking he’d be okay. He was, after all, indestructible.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., his older sister Kathleen and brother Joe flew to Los Angeles on Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey’s plane, Air Force Two.
At Good Samaritan Hospital, Kennedy wrote, his father’s head was bandaged and his face was bruised. A priest had already delivered last rites. His mother was there.
“I sat down across the bed from her and took hold of his big wrestler’s hand,” he wrote. “I prayed and said goodbye to him, listening to the pumps that kept him breathing. Each of us children took turns sitting with him and praying opposite my mom.
“My dad died at 1:44 a.m., a few minutes after doctors removed his life support. My brother Joe came into the ward where all the children were lying down and told us, ‘He’s gone.’ ”
Sirhan has been in prison for over fifty years now. His 50th anniversary took place on 23 May this year. He has been denied parole fifteen times.
At his last parole hearing in 2016, Schrade spoke on Sirhan’s behalf and apologized for not coming forward sooner to advocate for his release and exoneration.
September 15, 2019 -
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular | United States
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