RFK Jr urged probe into 'extra gunshots' theory in father's assassination during Obama's term
US health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr had called for a new probe into his father's 1968 assassination, citing audio evidence that allegedly captured more gunshots than the convicted killer's revolver could fire.
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As per The New York Post, Kennedy Jr wrote to then-Attorney General Eric Holder in 2012, requesting that the Obama administration review a recording made during the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
The letter was revealed Wednesday in a newly released batch of over 60,000 documents made public under a Trump-era executive order to declassify records related to the assassinations of Robert F Kennedy, John F Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The documents had been stored across federal agencies for decades and were digitised by the office of the director of national intelligence, currently led by Tulsi Gabbard. 'Today's release is an important step toward maximum transparency, finding the truth, and sharing the truth,' Gabbard posted on Truth Social.
In his 2012 letter, RFK Jr included an appeal from Paul Schrade, a former United Auto Workers official who was wounded during the attack.
'He was standing beside my father when Daddy was killed and Paul was himself wounded by a bullet,' Kennedy Jr wrote, backing Schrade's claim that fresh evidence demanded a reinvestigation.
Schrade and his legal team, including former US attorney Rob Bonner, believed a newly discovered tape suggested 'two gunmen fired at least 13 shots from two different .22 caliber revolvers and from opposing directions,' according to The New York Post.
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Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin, used an eight-shot revolver and was not seen reloading, raising suspicions that multiple shooters were involved.
The FBI's Los Angeles Field Office took up the matter and passed the recording, captured by a journalist at the crime scene, to the Digital Evidence Laboratory in Quantico, Virginia.
However, their 2013 report concluded that the recording was too poor in quality to confirm the number or direction of gunshots.
'The designated area recorded on specimen Q1 was of insufficient quality to definitively classify the impulse events as gunshots,' the FBI report stated.
While the newly released documents, as per The New York Times, include transcripts of interviews with Sirhan and other materials already available in California's state archives since the 1980s, they have yet to reveal any bombshell findings.
Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive was quoted by The Times saying, 'We have always known who assassinated RFK, because he was shot in front of a lot of people... So this collection can't be expected to change that history.'
Despite the public release and RFK Jr's continued doubts, Sirhan Sirhan remains behind bars in California. His 2021 parole request, which RFK Jr supported, was ultimately rejected by Governor Gavin Newsom.
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