Is Sirhan Sirhan really guilty of assassinating RFK?
Some 40 years after the shooting of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, new evidence has surfaced which suggests that the man serving a life sentence for his murder may not have fired the shots that killed the charismatic senator.
Earlier this week, forensic scientists met at a conference in Connecticut to discuss their independent findings on the Kennedy assassination.
Doubts
Many of the scientists have some serious doubts as to whether Sirhan Sirhan, currently serving a life sentence for the murder, actually fired the fatal shot that killed Kennedy.
One of the investigators, Dr. Robert Joling, has spent nearly 4 decades studying the Kennedy assassination.
He believes that he has determined that the fatal shot came from somewhere behind Kennedy, whilst Sirhan Sirhan was around four to six feet in front of the senator at the time, and never got close enough to him to have been able to have shot him from behind.
Analysis by another forensics engineer, Philip Van Praag, determined that a total of 13 shots were fired at the time of the Kennedy killing.
This data comes from analysis of a Canadian journalist’s tape recording, known as the Pruszynski recording, and raises a large issue as Sirhan’s gun only held eight bullets, according to the NBC reporter.
This ‘evidence’ would seem to suggest that there must have been a second shooter involved in the assassination of RFK.
‘Friendly’ Fire
Van Praag’s analysis led him to the conclusion that a second gun that was fired was a match for a type owned by one of Kennedy’s guards.
‘When that security guard was asked about owning that gun at first he admitted, ‘Yes I owned that kind of gun but I got rid of it two months before the assassination.’ correspondent Amy Parmenter said on MSNBC Wednesday.
‘It turns out upon further investigation, in fact, he did not get rid of that gun until five months after the shooting. Of course, you can see where we’re going with this. … That security guard, was in fact behind Senator Kennedy when the fatal shot was fired.’
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April 2nd, 2008 at 9:48 am
According to the bbc -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6169006.stm
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:52 am
Conspiracy theories are always so much more fun than the truth.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:53 am
Nice link Carl, I enjoyed reading that.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:54 am
‘Truth is in the mind of the beholder’ eh Rick?
April 23rd, 2008 at 10:38 am
In the recent news broadcasts Robert Joling repeats the myth that Sirhan never had a chance to shoot RFK in the back of the head. However, witnesses DiPierro, Romero, Plimpton, Urso and Yaro actually SAW RFK turn to his left to shake hands with Juan Romero and they all actually SAW Sirhan put the gun to the right rear side of RFK’s head and shoot.
Van Praag’s analysis has been proven to be flawed by the ONLY acoustics experts who have examined the tape in any great detail - Philip Harrison and Professor Peter French of York University - and I am confident that the AAFS peer review of Van Praag’s work will come to these same conclusions. (It should be noted that Harrison and French are ACOUSTICS scientists - Van Praag is an audio engineer - they are totally different areas of science).
Additionally, Robert Joling is NOT an acoustics expert - his role was simply in presenting his research into the ballistics evidence. His work was examined many years ago by leading forensics experts and found to be in error. Joling has even admitted he was wrong in concluding previous news broadcasts contained the sounds of all the gunshots. He was wrong in 1982 and he’s wrong now.
See: http://hnn.us/articles/44466.html and Steve barber’s acoustics article :
http://hnn.us/articles/36915.html
Steve Barber was the first person to publicize this tape to the world.(It was actually a CNN reporter who discovered the tape).
Additionally, earwitness testimony had never established a scenario in which 13 shots had been possible. FBI files show that the majority of pantry witnesses never heard such a large number of shots fired. The FBI files, furthermore, show that no one who had been in the pantry when Robert Kennedy was shot told the FBI or LAPD that 13 shots had been fired. Only one witness gave this number but she never said this at the time she made her original statement in 1968 when she said she heard ‘8 distinct shots’. In 1992 Nina Rhodes told conspiracy authors that she heard from 10-14 shots.
Most of the pantry witnesses (officially 77 in total; more if you count the number of people who heard shots and had been stationed in the vicinity of the pantry) described the gunshots in terms of a ‘number of shots’, ‘a series of firecrackers’, ‘several shots’ or ‘a number of shots in rapid succession’. Suzanne Locke said she heard ‘8 or 10’ shots. Most witnesses could not remember how many shots had been fired. However, of those witnesses who ventured an opinion about how many shots had been fired all but a few put the number of shots at 8 or less, including:
Barbara Rubin – ‘3 shots followed by 5 quick shots’.
Lon Bruce Rubin – ‘6 shots’.
Charles Bailey – ‘5 shots’.
Jimmy Breslin – ‘4 or 5 shots’.
Stanley Kawalac – ‘4 shots’.
Robert Ray Breshears – ‘4 shots’.
Thomas Perez - ‘7 shots in about 3 seconds’.
Uno Timanson – ‘3 or 4 shots’.
Rafer Johnson - ‘I don’t know how many shots, I couldn’t count them to tell you the truth, but I know it was like four or five.’
There is also a fair amount of consistency amongst a number of witnesses as to the grouping of the shots – first one, two or three shots then a pause followed by a rapid succession of shots. Kristi Witker said, “People were running in all directions. . . . there were two very distinct series of pop-pop-pop . . . pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Three pops, then five - eight in all. . . . I saw the gunman standing, pointing the gun and firing.”
Bill Eppridge said that when he got to ‘some doors that seemed small for the crowd’ he heard two shots in very rapid succession – “Eppridge at first thought these were fireworks as they had been in Chinatown, San Francisco, the day before and there were many fireworks there. There was a pause after the second shot and people were scattering. Eppridge realized that what he thought were fireworks were actually shots. He ran forward instinctively thinking he had better count the shots. He counted a total of six shots.”(FBI Interview with Bill Eppridge)
Furthermore Van Praag’s analysis of double shots is flawed. In the Discovery Channel broadcast, he quickly discounted a ricochet because the end of the pantry room is too far away to produce a ricochet sound as quickly as it is heard on the tape. However, the bullet could have ricocheted off any of the metal surfaces anywhere in the pantry, not just off the far wall.
Steve Barber and Philip Harrison are presently in the process of examining Van Praag’s work and already they have found fatal flaws in his conclusions that 13 shots had been fired. They expect to complete their work later this year and it will be published for peer review.
It is also clear from eyewitness testimony that, incredibly, no one saw this purported ‘second shooter’ (Don Schulman and Evan Freed, the only pantry ‘second-shooter’ ‘witnesses’ retracted their ‘confused’ statements). The pantry was small and the positioning of the people around RFK was well established by the investigations. Therefore van Praag’s claims that Sirhan did not shoot the fatal RFK bullet, which was fired at point blank range, leaves only one suspect for the second gun - Thane Cesar who was positioned behind the Senator. However, acclaimed investigative journalist Dan Moldea, who spent years researching Cesar’s background, has established Cesar was telling the truth. I challenge anyone to provide evidence to prove Cesar shot RFK and I also challenge them to take out a civil suit against Cesar and put their money where their mouth is.
Additionally I ask forum members to just think about what Cesar purportedly did – he positioned himself in front of Sirhan as the alleged second gunman at great risk to himself – AND – he sold his alleged murder weapon, an H and R .22 pistol, THREE MONTHS after the assassination instead of deep-sixing it in the nearest river! Had he been caught with the gun he risked a death sentence!
Despite the musings of other posters, there is absolutely no evidence of CIA involvement in the RFK assassination and I challenge anyone to produce it – and please -no wild speculation which, so far, is the sum total of all the RFK/CIA allegations so far.
See http://hnn.us/articles/32193.html and http://www.maryferrell.org/wiki/index.php/Essay_-_The_BBCs_Flawed_RFK_Story
which puts the lie to Shane O’Sullivan’s claims the CIA agents were at the Ambassador Hotel the night RFK was assassinated.
August 4th, 2008 at 1:50 am
hey mel,
did you also spout ‘intelligent’ arguments that only three shots were fired in dallas as well? audio analysis kinda did in all those three shot ‘experts’ now didn’t it?