Member of Indian Movement Is Found Guilty in 1975 Killing

Almost three decades after a member of the American Indian Movement, Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, was shot as she begged for her life and prayed along a darkened cliff in the South Dakota Badlands, a fellow member of the movement was convicted yesterday of her murder.

The verdict of murder, against Arlo Looking Cloud, 50, was returned by a federal jury in Rapid City, S.D. Prosecutors said the conviction carried a mandatory life sentence. John Graham, another former member of the group, known as AIM, has been indicted in the killing but is fighting extradition from Canada.

Mr. Looking Cloud's four-day trial offered a glimpse inside the politics and distrust within the militant Indian civil rights group at the height of its clashes with federal authorities in the 1970's.

Prosecution witnesses said AIM members wanted Ms. Pictou Aquash dead despite her active role in protests like the AIM occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973 because they feared she was a government spy.

Law enforcement authorities said they could not solve the 1975 case until now because no one within the movement would talk to them. That changed this week as a handful of former AIM members, some clearly reluctant to be on the witness stand, told jurors how Ms. Pictou Aquash was tied at the wrists and driven from Denver to her death after word spread that she might be telling AIM's secrets to the authorities.

Although federal prosecutors in Rapid City focused on Mr. Looking Cloud's role in the killing, their witnesses suggested that others, including AIM leaders, had orchestrated the killing.

Even Mr. Looking Cloud, a low-level AIM member, acknowledged that he had witnessed the shooting along with two other members of the group, but he said that he had not known what was about to happen because he was not included in the planning. ''They don't tell me nothing,'' Mr. Looking Cloud told the police in 2003 on a videotape that was played before jurors on Thursday.

Prosecutors declined to comment on whether they might now seek charges against others in the movement, but AIM leaders have repeatedly denied any role in Ms. Pictou Aquash's death and say they believe federal agents orchestrated it.

The trial, AIM supporters said, has left an unfair blemish on the legacy of a group always dedicated to helping Indians win rights and decide their own fate.

''The prosecutors have accomplished what they wanted,'' said an angry Barry A. Bachrach, a lawyer for Leonard Peltier, the AIM member who was imprisoned for life in the 1975 death of two F.B.I. agents and whose case has drawn worldwide attention from human rights leaders who say he was wrongly convicted. ''They're trying to smear Leonard, and they're trying to smear AIM. They're trying to change history.''

At one point in the trial, the prosecution's star witness, Ka-Mook Nichols, testified that she and Ms. Pictou Aquash had seen Mr. Peltier boasting about killing the agents and re-enacting what he had done.

That, Mr. Bachrach said, was an absurd claim.

''It's a lie, and I'm going to prove it's a lie,'' he said.

Mr. Peltier, he said, kept up with the case from his cell in Leavenworth, Kan., where yesterday marked his 28th year behind bars.