JFK assassination files released: Following an order by US President Donald Trump, the classified documents related to the 1963 assassination of former President John F Kennedy were released on Tuesday evening.
The documents comprise more than 1,100 files, which consist of approximately 31,000 pages. The classified files were posed on US National Archives and Records Administration.
The release of the JFK files was announced by Trump when he visited the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, as he emphasised that his administration would be releasing about 80,000 pages.
In a statement, the National Archives said that in accordance with the president’s directive, the release would encompass “all records previously withheld for classification.”
Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, on a visit to Dallas. He was killed while his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown as shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.
The police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who is reported to have positioned himself from a sniper's perch on the sixth floor. In a dramatic turn of events, Oswald was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby during a jail transfer.
Later, the Warren Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established to investigate, reached a conclusion that Oswald acted alone and asserted that there was no evidence of a conspiracy. However, the commission's findings didn’t quell a web of alternative theories over the decades.
According to AP, files in the new release included a memo from the CIA’s St. Petersburg station from November 1991 saying that earlier that month, a CIA official befriended a U.S. professor there who told the official about a friend who worked for the KGB. The memo said the KGB official had reviewed “five thick volumes” of files on Oswald and was “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.”
(With inputs from AP)