Son Says Government Killed Martin Luther King Jr.

June 19, 1997 Web posted at: 7:53 p.m. EDT (2353 GMT)

NEW YORK (Reuter) -- A son of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in a television interview to be broadcast on Thursday he believes his father's murder was part of a conspiracy that involved government officials all the way up to President Lyndon B. Johnson.

"Based on the evidence that I've been shown... I would think that it would be very difficult for something of that magnitude to occur on his watch and he not be privy to it," Dexter King said in an interview with ABC's "Turning Point."

King said he believes the U.S. government plotted his father's 1968 murder, fearing the civil rights leader's growing power and his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Members of the King family and Andrew Young, a former King aide and former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., called upon President Clinton to establish a commission to look into the assassination.

The commission should grant blanket amnesty to encourage witnesses to come forward and it should be funded by Congress, they said.

"The idea is not to punish anybody but ... to purge the soul of America of this terrible sin," Young said.

Separately, in an interview with "Emerge" magazine, Young said King asked him to take a lead in setting up a commission.

King told ABC he thinks the plot was designed by Army intelligence officers, the CIA and the FBI.

Asked if he believed President Johnson was part of the plot, he replied, "I do."

King's theory of his father's assassination is one long espoused by William Pepper, attorney for convicted assassin James Earl Ray.

Ray pleaded guilty to the murder in March 1969 and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. But he later recanted, saying he was coerced in order to avoid the death penalty.

Ray, now terminally ill with liver disease, has argued he was a fall-guy in a shadowy conspiracy.

King said he believes Ray was not involved in his father's murder. "I believe and my family believes that this man is innocent," King said.

Neither Young nor the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta returned telephone calls on Thursday.