Former US senator and attorney general Robert F. Kennedy, like his older brother, former President John F. Kennedy, was likely assassinated by senior CIA agents with the involvement of Israel, an American scholar says.

Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian immigrant, was convicted of murdering RFK and sentenced to death in 1969. His sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1972. He remains incarcerated at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility near San Diego, California.

RFK's death in 1968 has been the subject of widespread analysis, similar to the 1963 assassination of his older brother, John F. Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy was assassinated during celebrations following his successful campaign in the Californian primary elections while seeking the Democratic nomination for US president.

The 42-year-old presidential candidate was fatally shot shortly after midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California.

Various experts have ascribed a variety of motives to CIA involvement in the assassination of both Kennedys. The secretive nature of the CIA and its reputation for high level political assassinations in the 1960s has made it a plausible perpetrator for the murder of the Kennedy brothers.

Three men seen in video and photographs of the Ambassador Hotel immediately before and after the RFK assassination were positively identified as CIA operatives, said Kevin Barrett, an author and 9/11 researcher in Madison, Wisconsin.

“The assassinations of the Kennedy brothers were largely carried out on behalf of Israel,” Barrett told Press TV on Monday.

“John F. Kennedy was dedicated to shutting down Israel’s nuclear weapons program and was killed because the Israelis, specifically [former Israeli prime minister David] Ben-Gurion believed that this was an issue of survival for Israel” he added.

“Robert Kennedy’s convicted killer Sirhan Sirhan, the patsy who was chosen to be presented to the public as the supposed killer who was actually hypnotized and had no idea what he was doing there…was used for propaganda purposes by the Zionists who murdered both of the Kennedy brothers,” Barrett said.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the son of RFK, says he does not believe Sirhan had carried out the assassination and believes a second shooter did it.

In an interview with The Washington Post published this weekend, Kennedy said he had spent months reviewing autopsy results, police reports and interviewed witnesses who were there when his father was gunned down.

He told the newspaper that he also met Sirhan, 74, incarcerated in the massive Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility, a California state prison complex in the desert outside San Diego.