‘I was under hypnosis at time of shooting’ says Robert F Kennedy’s killer

FOR DECADES he claimed he could never remember the night he gunned down Senator Robert F Kennedy at a Los Angeles hotel, a murder that shocked the world and ripped the heart from a political dynasty still mourning the assassination of President John F Kennedy five years earlier.

Now Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian immigrant originally sentenced to death for the June 1968 crime and serving a life sentence in a California jail, has launched his latest bid for freedom with a raft of extraordinary allegations.

He claims crooked prosecutors framed him for the shooting by switching a bullet taken from Kennedy’s neck and presenting a fake matched to Sirhan’s gun as evidence in his 1969 trial.

And while he previously insisted he had no memory of being at the Ambassador Hotel as Kennedy celebrated winning the California primary for the Democratic Party nomination, he now admits he was there – but under hypnosis and acting as a decoy for the real killer, who escaped during the confusion.

The allegation another shooter was involved was first aired, and largely discredited, in 2003 and has similarities to the conspiracy theories that followed John F Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas in November 1963.

The new claims come in a 62-page court filing by a team of defence lawyers who say they have “formidable evidence” that Sirhan, 67, is innocent and that their client – who has been denied parole dozens of times since he first became eligible in 1975 – suffered “horrendous violations” of his civil rights.

William Pepper, who co-represented Sirhan in his last unsuccessful application in March, said: “We are satisfied that for the first time in 43 years of this case we think we have the evidence to set this conviction aside.”

Robert F Kennedy served as US attorney general during his brother’s administration and later as senator for New York. At the time of his death, aged 42, he was leading the race for his party’s nomination for the presidential election later that year.

His assassination by Sirhan, who was born in Jordan, was seen by many as one of the first major acts of terrorism against the US by Arabs opposed to the country’s support of Israel.

Sirhan testified at his trial that he killed Kennedy “with 20 years of malice aforethought”, referring to the 1948 creation of the state of Israel.

Three of Sirhan’s shots from a .22 calibre revolver struck Kennedy, and he died 26 hours later in hospital.

Soon after his conviction, Sirhan began claiming he could not remember anything about the shooting. In the years since his sanity has remained in question, fears stoked largely from rambling interviews he has given from jail and in appeals for parole by various lawyers.

The latest legal filing relies heavily on audiotape recorded by a journalist of the shooting which experts insist contains proof that 13 shots were fired, more than the eight that could have come from Sirhan’s gun.

It also alleges that, shortly before the trial, prosecutors deliberately removed from evidence a bullet taken from Kennedy’s body because it could not be matched to Sirhan’s weapon.

Mr Pepper said he was confident that Sirhan would win his freedom, adding: “This is one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice imaginable.”