(AFP) – Files related to the assassinations of former US attorney general Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. will be released in the coming days, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday. President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January directing the unredacted release of the Kennedy and King records along with those concerning the assassination of president John F. Kennedy.
In March, the National Archives released the final batch of files related to the November 1963 assassination of president Kennedy. Gabbard, speaking at a White House cabinet meeting, said the Robert F. Kennedy and King records were currently being scanned. “I’ve had over 100 people working around the clock to scan the paper around RFK, senator Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, as well as Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination,” she said. “These have been sitting in boxes and storage for decades,” Gabbard said. “They have never been scanned or seen before. We’ll have those ready to release here within the next few days.”
The National Archives has released millions of pages of records over the past decades relating to the assassination of president Kennedy, but thousands of documents had been held back at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. The Warren Commission that investigated the shooting of the charismatic 46-year-old president determined that it was carried out by a former US Marine sharpshooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone. But that formal conclusion has done little to quell speculation that a more sinister plot was behind Kennedy’s murder in Dallas, Texas, and the slow release of the government files added fuel to various conspiracy theories.
Robert F. Kennedy, the slain president’s younger brother, was assassinated in California in June 1968 by Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian-Jordanian man, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. King was assassinated in April 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a career criminal, pleaded guilty to King’s murder and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. He died in 1998.
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