New York City coppers have launched an online investigation after an online posting from a convicted felon confessed to shotting and robbing rapper Tupac Shakur.

Police spokesman Paul Browne said coppers were trying to establish if the post was legitimate. The claim was posted on the website AllHipHop.com. The bloke said he was paid $2,500 by another hip hop mogul to rob Shakur outside a studio in Manhattan in 1994.

Shakur suffered gunshot wounds in the robbery but survived only to be killed in 1996 in another unsolved slaying. According to AP the writer says that he is miffed with the bloke who hired him to carry out the crime. That person has wrongly accused him of being a government informant.

The bloke who hired him allowed him to keep some of the jewellery he stole from Shakur so it should all be provable. He thinks that the statute of limitations is over, and no one can be charged so he might as well say something about the guy who hired him's lies. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons website, a person by the same name as in the post is serving life in prison and is housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.

Coppers have a reason to be suspicious. After all it was recently posted on a news site that Tupac was alive and living in New Zealand. That turned out to be a hacker's hoax.