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SEKOU ODINGA was forced into hiding in 1969 when he and twenty other Black Panther Party members were wrongly charged with criminal conspiracy in the NY Panther 21 case. Several months later, while still underground, he traveled to Algeria to establish an international chapter of the Black Panther Party. Later, Sekou became an activist in the New Afri-kan Independence Movement and a member of the Black Liberation Army. On October 23, 1981, Sekou and Mtyari Shabaka Sundiata were ambushed by the NYC police and FBI agents. The police murdered Mtyari. Sekou was eventually captured, tortured, and eventually charged with the liberation of Assata Shakur and the expropriation of money from an armored car. Sekou was convicted of two federal charges under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO) Act and was sentence to forty years imprisonment and a $50,000 fine. He was also convicted of six state counts of attempted murder steaming form the defense of himself and Mtyari during the police attack in 1981. For this he was sentenced to concurrent life sentences.
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