Inmate suspected in plot to kill NY police chief

NEW YORK, Mar 7 (Reuters) A prisoner in New York sought to assassinate police Commissioner Ray Kelly, offering an undercover officer posing as a hit man 65,000 dollars to decapitate Kelly and blow up police headquarters, police said.

The inmate, David Brown, 47, wanted revenge for the police shooting of an unarmed man on his wedding day in November, police said in a statement yesterday. Brown was arrested at Rikers Island prison on Monday on suspicion of criminal solicitation.

While in jail Brown had asked someone to contact a contract killer, leading police to send an undercover officer to meet Brown, who offered the officer 15,000 dollars to decapitate Kelly and 50,000 dollars to blow up police headquarters in downtown Manhattan, the police statement said.

In taped telephone and in-person interviews, the inmate told the undercover officer he was ''fed up with the case where the guy got shot 50 times,'' and blamed Kelly for not taking the ''initiative to prosecute the officers.'' ''That kind of got me frustrated to the point where I want him murdered,'' police quote Brown as saying.

He was referring to a case in which police opened fire on three unarmed men outside a Queens strip club in November, killing groom Sean Bell after his bachelor party, hours before he was due to be married to the mother of his two children.

The police officers are the subject of a grand jury investigation.

Brown was convicted in 2001 of attempted murder of his wife and is serving time for violating an order of protection for her, police said.

Reuters SRS VP0502