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Sirhan Sirhan This article is about Robert F. Kennedy's assassin, for the Palestinian militant see Sirhan Sirhan (militant). (born March 19, 1944 in Jerusalem) was convicted of the June 5, 1968 assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. Sirhan shot Kennedy just minutes after the senator had won the California presidential primary.

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Sirhan was born to Palestinian parents in Jerusalem. Though he is commonly thought to have been a Muslim, he was raised a Christian. However, in his adult years he frequently changed his religious views, to Baptist, Seventh Day Adventist, and Rosicrucianism.[1]

Sirhan fired a .22 caliber silver Johnson revolver eight times into the crowd surrounding Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel shortly after Kennedy finished addressing supporters in the hotel's main ballroom, hitting Kennedy three times, with a fourth bullet grazing Kennedy's jacket. Sirhan was quickly detained at the scene by bystanders and then arrested. On March 3, 1969, in a Los Angeles, California court, Sirhan "confessed" that he had killed Kennedy "with 20 years of malice aforethought" (something that he would have been incapable of), although he has maintained since being arrested that he has no memory of the crime (it is so thoroughly blocked out, in fact, that numerous leading questions given under hypnosis were unable to produce such a narrative). The judge didn't accept this confession and it was later withdrawn. As with his brother John F. Kennedy, conspiracy theories regarding Robert Kennedy's assassination persist.

Sirhan supposedly believed himself deliberately betrayed by Kennedy's support for Israel in the June 1967 Six-Day War, which had begun exactly one year before the assassination. This is a chronological impossibility, however, as the "RFK must die" diary entries started before Kennedy's support of Israel became public knowledge. After his arrest, these journals and diaries (which, technically, are neither in the proper sense of the words) were discovered. Most of the entries were incoherent and repetitive, obsessing over a desire to kill Kennedy, among other things. When confronted with these, Sirhan couldn't deny writing them but expressed bafflement. In the 1990's, Sirhan would support the theory that he had been brainwashed, which some have attributed to the CIA's MK-Ultra program.

fame. Attempts of Sirhan's lawyer, Lawrence Teeter, to remove his case to Fresno where he claimed he could be given a fair trial, failed. Sirhan was convicted and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the California Supreme Court in its decision resulted in the invalidation of all pending death sentences imposed in California prior to 1972.

Sirhan has been routinely eligible for parole, but as of 2003 parole had been denied 12 consecutive times. Currently he is confined at the California State Prison in Corcoran. Sirhan's attorney Lawrence Teeter died on July 31, 2005 in Mexico.