April 17, 1944 - Sirhan Sirhan
The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 came at a moment when the senator appeared to be on a viable path to the Democratic presidential nomination. Sirhan later stated his motive explicitly in terms of Kennedy's support for Israel, and the attack's timing — carried out on the anniversary of the Six-Day War — reflected a political grievance that was largely unfamiliar to the American public at the time. Scholars have since identified the killing as an early instance of Middle East political violence reaching onto American soil, giving the act a significance that extends beyond the loss of one candidate.
From Wikipedia
Sirhan Bishara Sirhan (; Arabic: سرحان بشارة سرحان Sirḥān Bišāra Sirḥān; born March 19, 1944) is a Palestinian-Jordanian man who assassinated U.S. senator Robert F. Kennedy, the younger brother of U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 1968 United States presidential election on June 5, 1968. Sirhan was 24 years old at the time. On April 17, 1969, he was convicted of first-degree murder, among other charges. He was subsequently sentenced to death by gas chamber. In 1972, this was commuted to a life sentence in the aftermath of People v. Anderson. The circumstances surrounding the attack, which took place five years after President Kennedy's assassination, have led to numerous conspiracy theories.
In 1989, Sirhan told British journalist David Frost: "My only connection with Robert Kennedy was his sole support of Israel and his deliberate attempt to send those 50 fighter jets to Israel to obviously do harm to the Palestinians." Some scholars believe that the assassination was the first major incident of political violence in the United States stemming from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict (Sirhan carried out the attack on the first anniversary of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War), although it occurred at a time when the American public was overwhelmingly focused on the Vietnam War.
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