Man found who fought with Shakur

A man arrested in a gang sweep and questioned in the fatal shooting of Tupac Shakur is the same man who fought with Shakur in the lobby of the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas hours before Shakur was shot, his lawyer said Thursday.

Edi M.O. Faal said his client--Orlando Anderson, a reputed Lakewood gang member arrested as part of a massive raid Wednesday--was assaulted by Shakur and had nothing to do with the attack on the rapper. The fight was recorded by a security camera, but the man who fought with Shakur had not been publicly identified.

Shakur was shot four times as he sat in a car one block off the Las Vegas Strip about two hours after the Mike Tyson-Bruce Seldon prizefight Sept. 7. Faal said he did not know what ignited the confrontation between Anderson and the rapper.

With no solid leads, a wide variety of conflicting theories have circulated about who killed Shakur, including one that contends that the shooting was retaliation for the hotel scuffle.

But Las Vegas police Lt. Larry Spinosa said Thursday that “at this point, Orlando Anderson is not a suspect in the shooting of Tupac Shakur.” Las Vegas police had previously contended that the man in the video could not have committed the crime.

Faal said Anderson “has nothing to do whatsoever” with the rap star’s shooting.

Investigators in Las Vegas have noted that even if they do identify a suspect, they do not yet have a witness to the shooting to place the suspect there. Las Vegas police have been besieged with phone calls from people who claim to know something about the attack, which also slightly injured driver Marion “Suge” Knight, the CEO of Death Row Records, the label where Shakur recorded his last album.

“The investigation is still wide open,” Spinosa said.

Wednesday’s raids on 37 homes in Compton and nearby communities were aimed at a string of retaliatory incidents that followed the Shakur shooting. Anderson was taken into custody for an outstanding warrant stemming from an unrelated April murder.

Two Las Vegas detectives who joined in the raid on Anderson’s home interviewed him for more than an hour and have returned to Nevada.

Police apparently became interested in talking to Anderson after seeing him in a security camera videotape of the confrontation with Shakur and his associates after the boxing match.

Anderson “was assaulted at the MGM,” said Faal. “At the time he was being attacked, he did not know his attacker was Mr. Shakur. . . . He believes he is a victim of Tupac.”