Sean Combs Arrested in Tupac Shakur’s Murder – Fiction!
Summary of eRumor:
Sean Combs has been arrested for ordering the murder of Tupac Shakur in the 1990s.
The Truth:
No arrests have been made in Tupac Shakur’s 1996 murder.
The eRumor surfaced in September of 2014 after Huzlers, a fake news website, published an article that claimed Sean “Puffy” Combs had been arrested for ordering the hit on Shakur:
“On Thursday, September 17th, 2014, the arrest of Sean “Puffy” Combs may have been undertaken by authorities for the 1996 murder of Tupac Shakur on the Las Vegas, Nevada Strip. Associates in Combs’ organization have indicated off-the-record that, yes, Sean Combs was in fact under arrest. This disclosure comes just days after the 18th anniversary of the so far unsolved murder of the mega-superstar, Tupac Shakur.
“In a press release with the date of September 16th, 2014, a spokesperson for the Las Vegas District Attorney’s office said that there has come sufficient evidence to make an arrest and to obtain conviction for the murder of Shakur in 1996. This most probably indicates that an arrest warrant has been issued.”
Huzlers describes its own content as “bad fake news poorly written,” but it’s false account of Combs’ arrest drew lots of attention. That’s because it came days before the 18th anniversary of Shakur’s death, and because it echoed claims made by a former LAPD detective.
In the 2011 book “Murder Rap,” former detective Greg Kading claimed that the LAPD had “extensive tapes and documents and confessions from key players behind the alleged assassinations of Shakur” and Christopher Wallace, who is known as the Notorious B.I.G. and Biggie Smalls, LA Weekly reports.
In his self-published book, Kading claims that a member of the Southside Crips told police that Combs offered $1 million for the murders of Shakur and Suge Knight, the CEO of Bad Boy Records, on the Las Vegas Strip in 1996. Wallace, a friend and associate of Combs, was then killed six months later in retaliation, according to Kading’s account.
A more plausible theory is that gang member Orlando Anderson killed Tupac after a run-in with the famous rapper and his entourage a few hours earlier. Surveillance videotape captured Shakur and Knight beating Anderson in a hotel lobby earlier that night, Forbes reports:
“Orlando Anderson, on the other hand, did talk about it. The day after Tupac was shot, according to intelligence from then-gang detectives in the City of Compton, California, Orlando bragged all over the gang-infested streets in his ‘hood that he was the gunman who shot Tupac. But Orlando did not say word one about being hired to pull it off.
“Tupac’s murder appears to be street justice, plain and simple. Tupac and Suge beat up Orlando, so Orlando and his buddies went after Suge and Tupac the same night and shot them in a car-to-car shooting, at the passenger side where Tupac was sitting. Suge was hit with a bullet fragment in the base of his neck and survived; Tupac was shot several times, including in the chest, and died six days later.”
However, the truth may never be known. Anderson was killed 18 months after Shakur’s death in an unrelated shootout, the Guardian reports.