Thirty years after Tupac Shakur's death, a former rival is set to stand trial for his murder. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing BBC News.

Rapper Tupac Shakur was killed in a drive-by shooting on 7 September 1996 in Las Vegas. The incident changed the trajectory of hip-hop and elevated him to a cultural icon. Until 2023, no one had been arrested, when Duane "Keffe D" Davis was unexpectedly charged with the murder.

The 63-year-old former gang boss is due to stand trial in Las Vegas, accused of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.

The trial is likely to unravel the intricacies of the bitter East Coast vs West Coast rap rivalries and turf wars between the Bloods and the Crips street gangs that were immortalised in rap lyrics and news reports in the 1990s.

It could also include several celebrity witnesses, including Suge Knight, former CEO of Death Row Records, who has been thought of as the last surviving witness to Shakur's death.

The complicated case hinges almost exclusively on one key piece of evidence: a book co-authored by Davis that he has argued is partially a piece of fiction. Jury selection began on Monday, with opening arguments slated to start on 17 August.

To understand how the case became so mythologised, one must go back to rivalries that grew larger than the men at its centre. In the Los Angeles gang landscape of the 1990s, there was a vicious turf war between the Bloods (red) and Crips (blue). That territorial dispute spread through the airwaves as part of a bigger national rivalry: East Coast vs West Coast rap. The genre dispute was represented by two rival record companies: Knight's Death Row Records and Sean "Diddy" Combs' Bad Boy Records.

"The funny thing about it is Tupac is actually an East Coast rapper," said Jeff Pearlman, author of Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur. Born in New York City, Tupac moved to northern California as a teenager. He became known as a Southern California rapper after signing with Death Row Records, which included acts like Snoop Dogg and Dr Dre.

Santi Elijah Holley, author of An Amerikan Family: The Shakurs and the Nation They Created, says the Death Row persona never told the whole story. Tupac's mother Afeni was a Black Panther, and he grew up around the Black liberation movement. His music became his politics: "His activism was his art, his lyrics."

Tupac acted in several Hollywood movies and released hip-hop's first double album, All Eyez on Me, which sold over 5,000,000 copies. That album, which debuted months before his death, cemented his place in the canon of gangsta rap.

After he was shot in Las Vegas on 7 September 1996, he became immortalised as a martyr for the lifestyle he helped make famous.

That fatal night began when Tupac and Knight attended a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon at the MGM Grand. After the match, surveillance footage captured Tupac and members of his entourage, associated with the Mob Piru Bloods, attacking a man named Orlando Anderson, an alleged member of the South Side Compton Crips.

About three hours later, Tupac was riding in the passenger seat of Knight's BMW when a white Cadillac pulled alongside and opened fire. Tupac was hit four times and died six days later.

For nearly three decades, the killing remained one of America's most famous unsolved murders. Las Vegas police have long said witnesses refused to cooperate. Members of Tupac's entourage said police initially treated them like suspects and failed to follow important leads.

Within weeks, investigators had identified Anderson from the MGM footage and questioned him. He denied involvement and was never charged; he was killed in an unrelated shooting in 1998.

Over the years, police pursued thousands of tips, but the case stalled amid disappearing witnesses, limited physical evidence, and a street code that forbade cooperation with police.

Years later, Anderson's uncle, Davis, started talking and, according to police, blew the case wide open again.