Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian found guilty of shooting US presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy to death in 1968, was wounded in a stabbing at a California prison on Friday, according to media reports.
Celebrity website TMZ, citing unnamed sources, was first to report that Sirhan, 75, had been stabbed.
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Replying to a request for confirmation that Sirhan was wounded, Jeffrey Callison, a spokesman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said that an inmate had been stabbed at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego.
The wounded inmate was taken to a hospital outside the prison and is listed in stable condition, Callison said in a statement, and that a suspect has been identified in the assault.
In a follow-up email, Callison declined to identify the wounded inmate as Sirhan, citing department policy to not name victims.
A jury in 1969 found Sirhan guilty of assassinating Kennedy the previous year by opening fire with a .22-caliber pistol into a small crowd surrounding the Democratic candidate in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
Kennedy, a US senator from New York, was hit three times and died the next day. He was later buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, near his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1963.
Sirhan has said he fired at Kennedy because he was enraged by his support for Israel.
Five bystanders were wounded during the shooting. In the chaos, Los Angeles Rams football player Rosey Grier, Olympic champion Rafer Johnson, and others wrestled the murder weapon away.
Sirhan was sentenced to death, but the sentence was changed to life in prison after California suspended the death penalty in 2014. He has been denied parole several times.
As a high-profile prisoner, Sirhan had once been kept in a protective housing unit at Corcoran State Prison in Northern California. After he told authorities several years ago that he would prefer being housed with the general prison population, he was moved to the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility.
