Suge Knight has claimed that Tupac Shakur‘s friends and relatives smokes some of his ashes following his death.
The Death Row Records co-founder, who was driving the car in which Shakur was fatally shot in September 1996, shared his memories in a new interview with TMZ from prison.
According to Knight, Shakur’s mother Afeni asked for her son to be cremated immediately after his death. He claimed that he approached a funeral home worker and initially offered him $200,000 (£148,000) to carry out the cremation that night, before increasing the alleged payment to $1.2million (£889,000).
Knight said Afeni subsequently invited a group of Shakur’s friends and relatives to her Las Vegas hotel room, where some of the ashes were allegedly rolled into several blunts and smoked.
He said he declined to take part because he was on probation at the time and believed smoking human remains could constitute a violation.
“I was probably the only one who didn’t hit him,” Knight said.
He gave a similar account to People last year, when he said: “A bag with his ashes was passed around. His homies rolled him up. They smoked him.”
Members of Shakur’s group Outlawz also made similar claims in 2011, with Young Noble and EDI Mean saying they mixed some of his ashes with cannabis and smoked them during a memorial on a beach. They pointed to the posthumously released Tupac song ‘Black Jesuz’, in which he rapped: “Last wishes, n****s smoke my ashes“.
A spokesperson for Afeni denied that she or any other family members took part, insisting that she would “never participate in smoking her son”.
This week saw the opening of the trial into Shakur’s murder, with Duane ‘Keffe D’ Davis pleading not guilty to one count of murder with use of a deadly weapon. Prosecutors allege that he orchestrated the drive-by attack without firing the fatal shots himself.
Jurors were played a recording of a previously unreleased 2008 police interview on Thursday (August 20), in which David identified himself as the front passenger in the while Cadillac that pulled alongside the BMW carrying Shakur and Knight.
Davis said he handed a loaded gun to the vehicle’s back seat, where his nephew Orlando ‘Baby Lane’ Anderson and DeAndre ‘Dre’ Smith were sitting. He claimed that Anderson eventually took the weapon and opened fire.
“We did what we had to do,” Davis said in the recording, also claiming that he would have fired the shots himself had Knight’s BMW been positioned on his side of the Cadillac.
Shakur was shot multiple times on September 7, 1996 and died from his injuries six days later, aged 25.
Knight, meanwhile, is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence for an unrelated voluntary manslaughter conviction. He is on the prosecution’s witness list for the murder trial but has not yet testified.