New FBI Documents Show Kennedy Death Threats

(News Today) - The gunman who assassinated Robert Kennedy may have also plotted to kill his younger brother, Edward, according to FBI files published yesterday. Sirhan Sirhan allegedly offered a fellow prison inmate ‘a million dollars and a car’ to carry out the hit in 1977.

The prisoner, whose name was redacted in the document, told agents that he knew the target was the brother of slain President John F. Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy.

He was in the cell next to Sirhan in Soledad, California, for 18 months and said the assassin told him to contact his mother for more details if he was interested in carrying out the murder.

‘He advised he declined the contract,’ said the FBI report.

Sirhan, now 66, is serving a life sentence at Pleasant Valley State Prison in California, for shooting Bobby Kennedy on June 5, 1968, the night he won the primary election to seal his nomination as the Democrat presidential candidate.

The mentally unbalanced Palestinian Christian claimed his motive was because RFK had promised military support for Israel if he was elected to the White House.

Although the FBI alerted Senator Kennedy’s office and the police, agents never established the seriousness of the threat.

The Massachusetts senator died in August last year after battling brain cancer. He was the last surviving brother of the storied American political family.

The FBI released 2,352 pages of documents The previously classified files showed how he lived much of his life in the shadow of repeated threats on his life.

Most of the threats were made during his unsuccessful attempt to beat Jimmy Carter for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1980. They included investigation into warnings from groups like the Ku Klux Klan and the US National Socialist White People’s Party.

About four months after Robert Kennedy's assassination, the FBI office in Seattle alerted the agency's office in Boston and the director's office of four letters containing death threats.

Letter number two, which had originally been received by police in Canada, read: ‘To whom it may concern, a warning to the Kennedys. John Kennedy number one assassinated, Robert Kennedy number two assassinated, Ted Kennedy number three to be assassinated on Oct. 25, 1968. The Kennedy residence must be well protected on that date.’

After his brothers' assassinations, Kennedy wrote in his memoir "True Compass" released last year, that he was easily startled at loud sounds, and would hit the deck whenever a car backfired.

The new files also show that the FBI was told almost immediately of Edward Kennedy's car crash on Chappaquiddick Island off the coast of Massachusetts in July 1969, but authorities kept his identity secret.

Mary Jo Kopechne drowned after Senator Kennedy drove the car in which she was riding off a bridge into a pond on Chappaquiddick island.

He swam to safety, leaving Miss Kopechne in the car. The 28-year-old former worker with Robert Kennedy's campaign was found dead in the submerged car's back seat 10 hours later.

Senator Kennedy, then 37, pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and got a suspended sentence and probation.

In his memoir he wrote that his actions on Chappaquiddick were ‘inexcusable.’ He said he was afraid and ‘made terrible decisions’ and had to live with the guilt for more than four decades.

Source : kompas.com

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