Jamaican reggae icon Bob Marley died at the age of 36 after a hard fought battle with cancer back in 1981.
However, startling claims have emerged of a deathbed confession made by an ex-CIA officer, where he admitted to the killing.
79-year-old Bill Oxley is alleged to have claimed the murder of Marley among 17 other assassinations for the American government between 1974 and 1985, at a time when he said the CIA “was a law unto itself.”
In a purported interview shared widely online, he admitted having no problem with proceeding with the Bob Marley assassination because “I was a patriot, I believed in the CIA, and I didn’t question the motivation of the agency – I’ve always understood that sometimes sacrifices have to be made for the greater good.”
According to the conspiracy theory, Oxley used faked press credentials to gain access to Bob Marley at his Blue Mountain retreat; introducing himself as a famous photographer working for the New York Times, and gave Bob Marley a gift.
“I gave him a pair of Converse All Stars. Size 10. When he tried on the right shoe, he screamed out ‘OUUUCH.‘
That was it. His life was over right there and then. The nail in the shoe was tainted with cancer viruses and bacteria. If it pierced his skin, which it did, it was goodnight nurse.”
“There had been a series of high-profile assassinations of counter-culture figures in the United States in the late sixties, early seventies. By the time Bob Marley’s time came around, we thought subtlety was the order of the day. No more bullets and splattered brains.”
Mr. Oxley says he kept close contact with Marley during the final years of his life, ensuring the medical advice he received in Paris, London and the United States “would hasten his demise rather than cure him.”
“The last time I saw Bob before he died he had removed the dreadlocks, and his weight was dropping like a stone,” he says.
“He was very withdrawn, unbelievably small. He was shrinking in front of us. The cancer had done it’s job.”
Although widely dismissed as fiction, the account does tally with findings by UK scientists in 2014, who discovered the mysterious acral melanomas – the rare type of skin cancer that caused reggae musician’s demise – was in fact not caused by the sun.