Member of Central Park Five who Trump wanted executed responds to ex-president’s indictment: ‘Karma’

Yusef Salaam, who was one of the persons exonerated in the Central Park Five case, has responded after a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict the former president.

Mr Salaam was among five Black and brown teenagers wrongfully imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a white woman in New York’s Central Park. They were coerced into confessing to a rape they didn’t commit.

All served prison time before being exonerated in 2002. They later received a multimillion-dollar settlement from New York City.

"For those asking about my statement on the indictment of Donald Trump - who never said sorry for calling for my execution - here it is: Karma," Mr Salaam wrote on Twitter.

Mr Trump, then a real-estate developer in 1989, took out full-page advertisements in four New York City newspapers calling for the state to reinstate the death penalty following the Central Park attack.

The 45th president in 2019 refused to walk back or apologise for his previous stance, saying "you have people on both sides of that". "They admitted their guilt."

Mr Salaam recently announced his candidacy for New York City Council.

Mr Trump has become the first former US president to be indicted, the culmination of a political rise defined by unprecedented scandal.

The one-term president is reportedly facing more than 30 counts related to business fraud, sources told CNN.

The Manhattan district attorney’s office said on Thursday that prosecutors had reached out to Trump’s lawyers to arrange for him to surrender, which could happen early next week.

Mr Trump is expected to appear at the prosecutor’s office to be processed and fingerprinted and have a mug shot taken. He is also expected to appear in court, when a judge would list the charges and the former president would enter a plea.

He will have to contend with a criminal case while running again for the White House, taking time and attention away from the campaign trail – though neither the case nor a conviction would preclude him from seeking or winning the presidency in 2024. The indictment comes as he is facing several other investigations that could lead to legal problems for the former president.

Those pending cases, along with a civil trial that’s scheduled to start in New York next month over a columnist’s claims that Mr Trump raped her in the 1990s, add to an ever-growing cloud of scandals surrounding him.

With inputs from agencies