(Bishara) Sirhan Sirhan - Personal information, Applications for parole

Assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy, born in Palestine. He was a refugee whose family settled in Pasadena, CA, in 1956, having fled from Israeli bombings in Beirut. When Robert Kennedy, who was running for the presidential nomination in 1968, took an overtly pro-Israeli stance in order to gain Jewish votes, Sirhan was enraged and shot him. At his trial, he said that Kennedy's repeated promises of arms for Israel ‘burned him up’. He was found guilty of premeditated murder in the first degree, and the death penalty was recommended. Senator Edward Kennedy's plea for lenience led to this sentence being commuted to life imprisonment.

Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (born March 19, 1944) was convicted of murdering Senator Robert F. Sirhan shot Kennedy shortly after midnight on June 5, 1968, in Los Angeles, just minutes after the senator had won the California presidential primary.

Personal information

Sirhan was born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem and was raised a Maronite Christian. Kennedy

Sirhan fired a .22 caliber Iver Johnson revolver eight times into the crowd surrounding Kennedy in the kitchen pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles shortly after Kennedy finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom, possibly hitting Kennedy three times, with a fourth bullet grazing Kennedy's jacket. Sirhan was quickly detained at the scene by bystanders (including among them Rosey Grier, a large Los Angeles Rams NFL football player) and then arrested. Shortly after the shooting, it was reported that Jesse Unruh, Kennedy's campaign manager, had been hit, along with Paul Shrade, head of the United Automobile Workers union.

On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles courtroom, Sirhan confessed that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought," although he has maintained since being arrested that he has no memory of the crime - it is so thoroughly blocked out that numerous leading questions asked under hypnosis were unable to produce a cohesive narrative. Kennedy, there are still a large number of people who doubt the officially accepted story of Bobby Kennedy's assassination that casts Sirhan in the role of "lone gunman". Such views are becoming more widespread after the evidence cited by Sirhan's most recent lawyer Lawrence Teeter, in the June 11th, 2003 interview with Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter on KPFA 94.1's Guns & For instance Lawrence Teeter, Sirhan's lawyer until Teeter's death in 2005 stated that Sirhan was out of position to shoot Kennedy. Kennedy was shot from behind, while witnesses stated Sirhan was in front of him. More bullets were fired than could have come from Sirhan's gun.

Motives

Wikisource has original text related to this article: Sirhan Sirhan's diary

Sirhan supposedly believed himself deliberately betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War, which had begun exactly one year before the assassination. However the "RFK must die" diary entries started before Kennedy's support of Israel became public knowledge. Most of the entries were incoherent and repetitive, though a single entry obsessed over a desire to kill Kennedy. When confronted with this entry, Sirhan couldn't deny writing them but rather expressed bafflement. In the 1990s, Sirhan proposed the theory that he had been brainwashed. Those who believe that Sirhan was acting in a hypnotic trance generally believe that CIA's MKULTRA program was responsible for this. Sirhan had once volunteered to be a entranced by a stage hypnotist and had proved to be a remarkably easy person to hypnotise. Attempts by Sirhan's lawyer, Grant Cooper, to remove his case to Fresno where he claimed he could be given a fair trial, failed. Diamond M.D., a well known professor of law and psychiatry at University of California, Berkeley, who testified that Sirhan was suffering from diminished capacity at the time of the murder. Sirhan was convicted and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the California Supreme Court in its People v. Sirhan's most recent lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, adamantly maintained that Grant Cooper was compromised by a conflict of interest and was, as a consequence, grossly negligent in defense of his client.

Applications for parole

Sirhan has been routinely eligible for parole, but as of 2006 parole had been denied 13 consecutive times. Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter died on July 31, 2005, in Mexico. Sirhan was again refused parole on March 15, 2006. Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed: The Story of Two Victims.