Assassination of Meir Kahane

On the evening of 5 November 1990, Meir Kahane, an Israeli-American rabbi and ultranationalist politician, delivered a speech in the second-floor lecture hall of the New York Marriott East Side hotel (at 525 Lexington Avenue) in Manhattan to an audience that was largely composed of Orthodox Jews. After the speech, as a crowd of well-wishers gathered around Kahane to ask questions, a man identified by witnesses as El Sayyid Nosair, disguised as an Orthodox Jew, approached and shot Kahane at close range in the neck with a .357-caliber pistol shortly after 9:00 p.m. Kahane died of his wounds shortly afterward.

Nosair fled the hotel onto Lexington Avenue and attempted to hijack a taxi at gunpoint near a post office. Carlos Acosta, an on-duty U.S. Postal Inspection Service officer, witnessed the attempted carjacking, drew his weapon, and ordered Nosair to freeze. Nosair instead turned and shot Acosta in the chest. Acosta returned fire, striking Nosair in the chin, and then arrested him. Both Acosta and Nosair survived their injuries.

Nosair was subsequently charged with murdering Kahane but denied all charges throughout the legal proceedings. Although witnesses identified him as the shooter, he was not convicted of the assassination itself. This outcome was influenced in part by Kahane's family opposing an autopsy and the extraction of bullets from Kahane's body, which limited forensic evidence available to prosecutors. Nosair was instead convicted of assault, possession of an illegal firearm, and shooting Acosta, and was sentenced to 22 years in prison — the maximum allowed for those charges.

Nosair began serving his sentence at Attica Correctional Facility in New York. In 1993, Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the "Blind Sheikh," was arrested in New York; a subsequent investigation found that a terrorist cell led by Abdel-Rahman had conducted surveillance of Attica and discussed a plan involving a truck bomb and armed assault to free Nosair from prison. Several years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Nosair confessed to federal agents that he had assassinated Kahane.

At the time of the shooting, the killing was categorized as an antisemitic hate crime. In later years it has been reassessed by some as an early instance of Islamic terrorism in the United States. Separately, a 2010 report in the Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post, citing Playboy magazine, stated that Nosair claimed to have had two accomplices at the hotel that night, and that his original intended target had been Israeli military figure and future prime minister Ariel Sharon. The two individuals named in that account have not been charged in connection with the case.