US authorities released thousands of secret files Wednesday on president John F. Kennedy’s assassination, a case that still fuels conspiracy theories despite the official conclusion he was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald, IgbereTV reports.
The CIA and FBI files show US investigators spread their net wide and deep to find out if Oswald conspired with others in the November 22, 1963, murder that shocked the world.
Documents show they chased down myriad leads from Soviet intelligence to African communist groups and the Italian mafia.
They also show the extensive US efforts to spy on and influence the communist government of Fidel Castro in Cuba, which Oswald had contacts with and which Kennedy had sought to overthrow.
The 1,491 documents, many of them lengthy reports, were posted on the JFK Assassination Records page of the National Archives, which already has tens of thousands of record listings related to Kennedy’s death and the investigation that followed.
Kennedy’s assassination has long given rise to numerous conspiracy theories that do not accept the official verdict that Oswald worked alone when he shot Kennedy as the young president was rolling through the streets of Dallas, Texas in a convertible limousine.
Some believe Oswald, a communist sympathizer, was put up to it by Cuba or the Soviet Union.
Others believe that anti-Cuba activists, possibly with support in US intelligence or the FBI, had Kennedy killed.
And still, others believe his political rivals could have been at the root of the assassination.
