JFK assassination files released, sending history buffs hunting for new clues

Dallas (US): More than 63,000 pages of records related to the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy were released following an order by President Donald Trump, many without the redactions that had confounded historians for years and helped fuel conspiracy theories.

The US National Archives and Records Administration posted to its website on Tuesday roughly 2,200 files containing the documents. The vast majority of the National Archives' collection of over 6 million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artifacts related to the assassination have previously been released.

Larry J Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centre for Politics and author of “The Kennedy Half-Century,” said it will take time to fully review the records.

“We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that,” he said.

Trump announced the release Monday while visiting the John F Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, saying his administration would be releasing about 80,000 pages.

“We have a tremendous amount of paper. You've got a lot of reading,” Trump said.

Before Tuesday, researchers had estimated that 3,000 to 3,500 files were still unreleased, either wholly or partially. And just last month the FBI said it had discovered about 2,400 new records related to the assassination.

Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a repository for files related to the assassination, said in a statement posted on the social platform X that the release is “an encouraging start.” He said much of the “rampant overclassification of trivial information has been eliminated” from the documents. The National Archives said on its website that in accordance with the president's directive, the release would encompass “all records previously withheld for classification.”