LOS ANGELES: The man convicted of shooting dead Robert F. Kennedy in a 1968 assassination that rocked the United States was granted parole on Friday.

Sirhan Sirhan, now 77, has been behind bars for five decades — despite doubts that he fired the shots that likely changed the course of US politics.

Kennedy, the younger brother of slain president John F. Kennedy, was campaigning for the Democratic nomination when he was gunned down in a Los Angeles hotel.

His murder came just months after the killing of Black civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, and as a divided America was deep in an unpopular war in Vietnam.

Sirhan was convicted and sentenced to death in 1969 after pleading guilty. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment several years later.

But doubts soon surfaced that he was actually responsible for Bobby Kennedy’s death, with claims that there could have been a second gunman in the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968.

Kennedy had given a speech at the hotel after winning California’s Democratic presidential primary.

On a walkabout in the kitchen where he met staff, he was shot, as were several other people in his entourage, among them Paul Schrade, who took a bullet to the head.

Schrade and Kennedy’s then-14-year-old son have since campaigned for Sirhan’s release, saying the evidence against him does not stack up.

“It is a good decision,” Schrade said on Friday. “I’m really grateful to the parole board for giving Sirhan the chance to go home.”

The vote on Friday by a two-person panel of the California parole board does not mean that Sirhan will automatically be released.

The decision is subject to a three-month review, after which the matter will reach state Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who faces a recall vote in September.

During Friday’s hearing, Kennedy’s youngest son, Douglas, spoke in favour of Sirhan’s release, media reports said, adding that Robert F. Kennedy Jr had sent a letter of support to the parole board.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr told the Washington Post in 2018 that he had visited Sirhan in the California desert prison where he was serving his sentence, and had become convinced that an injustice had been perpetrated.

“I went there because I was curious and disturbed by what I had seen in the evidence,” he told the paper. “I was disturbed that the wrong person might have been convicted of killing my father.”

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2021