Senator Robert Francis Kennedy (42), brother of the late President John F. Kennedy, Attorney General in the latter's Administration, and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 1968 Presidential election, died at 1.44 a.m. on June 6 in the Good Samaritan Hospital, Los Angeles, without regaining consciousness, after having been shot 26 hours earlier by a Jordanian Arab, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (24), who was immediately taken into custody by the Los Angeles police.
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The assassination of Senator Kennedy came 4 1/2 years after the assassination of his brother, the late President, in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1968, and only two months after the killing of Dr. Martin Luther King, the civil rights leader, in Memphis.
The shooting occurred shortly before midnight on June 4 at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles; which was packed with Kennedy supporters celebrating Senator Kennedy's victory in the Californian presidential primary election held the same day. While Senator Kennedy, surrounded by supporters and aides, was taking a short cut through a kitchen corridor to the ballroom of the hotel, a man subsequently identified as Sirhan stepped forward and fired eight shots from a revolver. Senator Kennedy was twice hit, in the head and in the shoulder, and slumped to the floor covered with blood. Five of his supporters were also hit--Mr. Paul Schrade, a trade union official, with a scalp wound; Mr. William Weisel, a television producer, shot in the left side; Mr. Irwin Stroll, a television technician, hit in the foot; Mr. Ira Goldstein, hit in the left hip; and Mrs. Elizabeth Evans, wounded in the leg.
Senator Kennedy was rushed by ambulance first to the Central Receiving Hospital and then to the Good Samaritan Hospital, where a team of six neuro-surgeons worked for more than three hours to extract the larger part of a bullet and several pieces of bone from the brain. His condition on arrival at the hospital was described as extremely grave, and as a precaution he was given the Last Rites by a Roman Catholic priest. For 24 hours surgeons and doctors fought to save Senator Kennedy's life, but, as stated above, he died in the early hours of June 6. A preliminary post-mortem report said that Senator Kennedy had died from a gunshot wound which penetrated his brain and which he could not have survived.
Sirhan was overpowered by Kennedy aides immediately after the shooting in the Ambassador Hotel and, as stated, taken into custody by the Los Angeles police. Investigations showed that he was born in 1944 in a Palestinian village (later part of Jordan and to-day in the Israeli-occupied territory near Jerusalem), that he had been admitted to the U.S.A. as a permanent resident with his family in 1957, when 12 years of age, and that he lived in Pasadena; his father had returned to Jordan shortly after emigrating to the U.S.A., but his mother and several children had remained in America. Sirhan refused to answer questions about his motives after his arrest, but according to press reports he had shouted immediately after the shooting, "I did it for my country." According to reports in the Press, Sirhan worked as a store clerk and had once wanted to be a jockey. He was arraigned on six charges of assault with intent to murder--one charge each in respect of Senator Kennedy and the five other persons shot.
(International Herald Tribune - U.S. Information Service - Times - Daily Telegraph - Guardian)
This article comes from Keesings Worldwide Online
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