On Tuesday, United States President Donald Trump’s administration declassified thousands of documents related to the 1963 assassination of former President John F Kennedy (JFK), whose death has fuelled at least six decades of conspiracy theories.
Here is what we know so far:
How many documents were released?
On Tuesday evening, 2,182 PDF documents, comprising about 63,400 pages, were uploaded to the US National Archives and Records Administration’s website. The documents were released in two rounds, a few hours apart.
According to the National Archives, “all records previously withheld for classification” have been released and are accessible either online or in-person. Many of the documents were handwritten or typewritten.
Trump issued an executive order on January 23, announcing that documents pertaining to the deaths of JFK, as well as his younger brother, Senator Robert F Kennedy (RFK) and civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr (MLK) would be declassified.
On Monday, Trump announced at the Kennedy Center that the documents would be released the following day. At least 80,000 pages were expected to be released.
It may take historians and conspiracy theorists months to examine the new documents and make sense of what they reveal.
When was JFK assassinated?
JFK, a Democrat, was US president from January 1961 until November 22, 1963, when he was killed at the age of 46.
He was shot dead while riding his motorcade through Dallas, Texas alongside his wife, Jacqueline Kennedy, Texas Governor John Connally and Connally’s wife, Nelly Connally. The attack also wounded Governor Connally.
After JFK’s death, his vice president Lyndon B Johnson was sworn in as president. Johnson ordered a probe under Chief Justice Earl Warren into the assassination. The Warren Commission concluded that former marine turned communist activist, Lee Harvey Oswald, 24, was alone responsible for the killing.
Why is there a conspiracy around JFK’s death?
The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald was acting alone, without influence from other domestic or foreign actors.
But Kennedy’s killing, at the height of the Cold War, has always fuelled speculation – a Gallup poll in November 2023 found that 60 years after the assassination, two-thirds of Am