A long-delayed murder trial may shed light on who ordered the decades-old killing of a American Indian Movement (AIM) activist who was shot in the head and left to die on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation.
John Graham, a Southern Tutchone Indian from Canada and former AIM member, heads to trial on murder charges this week in South Dakota court. Prosecutors allege Graham was one of three AIM activists who kidnapped and killed Annie Mae Aquash because AIM leaders believed she was a government spy.
Aquash’s death, which occurred 35 years ago next month, quickly became synonymous with the violent clashes between AIM and federal authorities in the 1970s. One person has been convicted of the murder and another pleaded guilty this month in connection with her kidnapping.
Graham, 55, has maintained his innocence in the killing.
Among those who could testify at Graham’s trial are Arlo Looking Cloud, who was convicted in 2004 in connection with Aquash’s murder and has said Graham pulled the trigger, and Thelma Rios, who pleaded guilty this month to being an accessory to Aquash’s kidnapping and received a suspended prison sentence.
Rios was originally to go on trial with Graham. Now, her plea could prove pivotal to Graham’s prosecution. In a court hearing this month, Rios said she relayed a message to AIM members in Colorado that Aquash should be taken from Denver to Rapid City, the Rapid City Journal reported. She also acknowledged hearing discussions about whether Aquash should be killed, the Journal reported.
The prosecution’s theory, based on court documents and witnesses, is that Graham, Looking Cloud and a third AIM member, Theda Clark, were told in late 1975 to take Aquash from Denver to Rios’ apartment in Rapid City. There, she was interrogated by AIM members and allegedly raped by Graham. Aquash was driven to the reservation, then killed and left in a ravine, where her body was found in February 1976.
AIM leaders have consistently denied personal involvement in Aquash’s death.
For years, witnesses refused to come forward. Many feared retribution from AIM or distrusted the FBI, said Norman Zigrossi, who was in charge of the FBI’s Rapid City office at the time.
Longtime observers of the case say Graham, as the alleged killer, could lead authorities further.
“There’s no doubt that John Graham could lead to the leadership,” said Paul DeMain, an Indian journalist who has long researched the case.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the