(Sam Costanza)
Amadou Diallo
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One of the four cops involved in the fatal shooting of unarmed Bronx immigrant Amadou Diallo finally got his NYPD gun back yesterday — more than 13 years after the 41-bullet debacle that rocked the city.
Officer Kenneth Boss, 41, had battled three consecutive police commissioners for the right to carry a gun again, including the current commish, Ray Kelly, who finally agreed to allow him to have the department’s standard 9mm weapon, police sources told The Post.
It was unclear why Kelly suddenly changed his mind, the sources added.
Regardless, “[Boss] is relieved it’s all finally over,’’ said a source who talked to the cop recently, adding that the officer immediately went to the police gun range to requalify.
“This is what he was fighting for. He thinks that he was found not guilty in Criminal Court, he didn’t do anything wrong, so if he did nothing wrong, he should be allowed to be a cop,” the source said.
The officer had fired five shots in the barrage of bullets that felled the 24-year-old Diallo in February 1999. In the dark that night, the cops had mistaken Diallo for a rape suspect and opened fire on him as he reached for what they thought was a gun. He was going for his wallet. He was struck by 19 bullets.
Boss had been acquitted of criminal charges in the case, as were the other cops, and cleared of wrongdoing by the NYPD Firearms Discharge Review Board.
He is the only one of the four cops to remain on the force: One retired, and the others became firefighters.
Most recently, Boss has been working at Emergency Service Unit headquarters at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, assisting in SCUBA- and rope-training classes and doing repair work in the shop on motors, sources said.
He had already filed — and lost — state and federal lawsuits to win back his weapon. That left him at the mercy of the police commissioner.
Kelly had argued in his affidavit in the state suit that if Boss ever had to shoot in the line of police duty again, “he and the department would be inappropriately subjected to prejudgment.”
The cop tried to argue in his federal case that his constitutional rights were being violated by the ban. Boss said he had become a department “pariah’’ who was “forced to endure regular taunts because of his [no-gun] status.” Some officers mocked him as “Kenny No-Gun,” Boss said.