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THOUSANDS OF PAGES of unredacted documents on the assassination of John F Kennedy were released this week – but historians say that it will take time to go through the files and that that not many revelations are expected.
The files are being made available following an order by US president Donald Trump earlier this year.
Experts and historians are combing through the over 1,100 files consisting of in excess of 31,000 pages related to the 1963 assassination.
Larry J Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Centwe for Politics and author of The Kennedy Half-Century, said “We have a lot of work to do for a long time to come, and people just have to accept that”.
The vast majority of the National Archives’ collection of more than million pages of records, photographs, motion pictures, sound recordings and artefacts related to the assassination have previously been released.
Prior to the release of these files, researchers had estimated that the number of files still to be released either in whole or in part was around 3,000 to 3,500. The files released earlier this week are a fraction of these.
Jefferson Morley, vice president of the Mary Ferrell Foundation said: “Rampant over classification of trivial information has been eliminated and there appear to be no redactions, though we have not viewed every document.”
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Jackie and John F Kennedy in Texas minutes before JFK was assassinated Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
Trump announced the release on Monday while visiting the John F Kennedy Center 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.
JFK’s Assassination
There have been countless conspiracy theories spawned regarding the details surrounding Kennedy’s assassination throughout the decades.
Kennedy was killed on 22 November 1963 on a visit to Dallas, when his motorcade was finishing its parade route downtown and shots rang out from the Texas School Book Depository building.
Police arrested 24-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald, who had positioned himself from a sniper’s perch on the sixth floor. Two days later nightclub owner Jack Ruby fatally shot Oswald during a jail transfer.
Oswald was a former US Marine who defected to the Soviet Union before returning home to Texas.
Files in the release included a memo which described Oswald, as a “poor shot”. The memo also included that a KGB official was “confident that Oswald was at no time an agent controlled by the KGB.”
The documents also confirm that Oswald visited both the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico City before killing JFK.
With additional reporting from Press Association
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