The White House on Friday said that it would delay release of classified documents related to US President John F Kennedy

The files have been classified for long. US President Joe Biden said in statement that the remaining files on JFK killing “shall be withheld from full public disclosure” until December 15 next year. It will nearly be 60 years after assassination of JFK in Dallas, Texas in 1963.

In 2018, former president Donald Trump released several thousand secret files on the assassination, but withheld others on national security grounds.

The White House said the national archivist needs more time for a review into that redaction, which was slowed by the pandemic.

Biden also said the delay was “necessary to protect against identifiable harm to the military defense, intelligence operations, law enforcement, or the conduct of foreign relations” and that this “outweighs the public interest in immediate disclosure.”

Biden said in the statement that the JFK assassination was a “profound national tragedy” that “continues to resonate in American history and in the memories of so many Americans who were alive on that terrible day,” 

The Kennedy assassination was investigated by then-US Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren. The conclusion was that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine who had lived in the Soviet Union assassinated Kennedy. It was concluded that he acted alone.

a former Marine who had lived in the Soviet Union, acted alone when he fired on Kennedy’s motorcade.

But the Commission’s investigation was criticised for being incomplete, with a Congressional committee later concluding that Kennedy was “probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

US law requires that all government records on the assassination be disclosed “to enable the public to become fully informed.” 

(With inputs from agencies)