WASHINGTON (AP) — The widow of Martin Luther King Jr. presented new evidence to Attorney General Janet Reno in an appeal for another investigation of her husband’s assassination.
“We presented new evidence that has come to our attention about the assassination of my husband,” Coretta Scott King told reporters afterwards. “She listened very sympathetically.”
The evidence included “new witnesses coming forth that had never been investigated,” Mrs. King said, but she would not elaborate.
She said she proposed a national commission with the power to subpoena evidence, to grant immunity and to prosecute, “because all this evidence needs to be presented to an official body.” “
Young said Reno did not say how soon she would get back to the King family.
Dexter King said polls show a large majority of Americans doubt the official story that James Earl Ray, acting alone, shot his father. He said a new inquiry is necessary “so once and for all this can be put to rest.”
The King family has said in recent months that Ray was a scapegoat who did not act alone.
Ray, 70 and dying from liver disease, pleaded guilty 11 months after the April 4, 1968, assassination but immediately recanted and has maintained his innocence since. He has sought a trial.
“Ray neither had the motive, the money nor the mobility to have done it by himself,” the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who was with King when he was shot in Memphis, Tenn., said last Sunday. “The haunting question is how deeply did the assassination go into our government?”
The FBI undertook a campaign in the 1960s, under then-Director J. Edgar Hoover, to harass and spy on King and other civil rights leaders. The FBI campaign, not disclosed until years later, included sending letters and tapes to Mrs. King in attempts to discredit her husband.