Conspiracy theories about Tupac faking his death in 1996 resurface on his birthday

Conspiracy theories about Tupac Shakur faking his own death and still being alive have not died down even after over two decades of his murder in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting in 1996. The bizarre rumours surfaced once again on Tuesday, what would have been his 49th birthday if the American rapper was still alive.

Tupac Shakur's murderer was never found even after an extensive investigation, leading the conspiracy theorists to believe that the rapper survived the shooting and went incognito. Meanwhile, several of his fans claimed to have seen him on various occasions, and shared pictures of people with uncanny resemblance to the rapper on social media, reports Daily Star.

A similar picture of a Tupac lookalike from a 2011 TV interview was circulated in 2018. People claimed that Tupac was there sporting a neon yellow raincoat when a reporter was interviewing a protester at Wall Street in New York. The footage showed the man looking at the camera before disappearing behind the mass of people in the crowd. He reappeared seconds later with the hood covering his face.

Another clip surfaced in November last year with a man bearing similar features to Tupac talking on the mobile, and a month later, footage of a young man dancing in a restaurant in Alabama went viral.

When fans remembered the rapper on his birthday, they also recalled these footages. Some even claimed that the musician had dropped secret hints about going incognito in the last song in his album "Better Dayz." In "Outro," the final song of his eighth and final album, Tupac makes reference to coming back from the dead.

"Expect me like you expect Jesus to come back," read the lyrics of the song that was released six years after his death.

There is another theory about the rapper faking his death. Before his death in 1996, he began calling himself Makaveli, a reference to the Italian philosopher Niccolò Machiavelli, who proposed that deceiving enemies could be done by making everyone believe that you have died. Some also believe that Makaveli was an anagram meaning "Mak Alive," reports The Sun.

Meanwhile, some conspiracy theorists believe that Tupac is in a prison in Los Angeles while others say he is living in Cuba. The theorists claim that Tupac survived the shootout as he was known to wear a bullet-proof vest to protect himself around Los Angeles, and a video from the night of his murder purportedly showed him wearing one.

Suge Knight, former head of Death Row Records who was driving the car that got shot up when Tupac was murdered, insinuated that Tupac is alive and said the rapper was laughing on the way to the hospital after he was shot. He also claimed that Tupac had spoken about faking his own death when they were on holiday shortly before he died, while his son Suge J Knight said he believes Tupac's death was staged by the Illuminati and he is actually living in Malaysia. However, there have been no concrete pieces of evidence to support any of these theories.