The US government has started releasing the remaining classified documents about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which continues to fuel conspiracy theories even more than 60 years after the event.
The release of these documents follows an executive order by President Donald Trump in January of this year, requesting that previously redacted confidential documents related to the assassination be unsealed.
Historians do not expect significant new revelations from the documents, which were made available for detailed examination after their release last night. Trump had estimated that about 80,000 pages of documents would be unsealed.
While the government has previously allowed the release of hundreds of thousands of documents about Kennedy, some have remained withheld, citing national security concerns. Many Americans still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who was blamed for the assassination, did not act alone.
Kennedy was assassinated during a visit to Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. The National Archives released a large portion of the JFK-related materials previously, including over six million pages of documents, photos, films, audio recordings, and artifacts.
Though many of these materials were previously released in partially redacted form, the recent batch of documents includes some sections that are still redacted or difficult to read due to fading or poor scanning quality.
A government commission had concluded that Oswald was the sole assassin, but surveys have shown that a significant portion of Americans still believes there was more to the story.
This release also comes after calls from Trump and Joe Biden to declassify other documents related to the murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., both assassinated in 1968.
