US releases FBI files on civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr

Washington, DC: US President Donald Trump has released files related to the 1968 assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr, despite opposition from most of his family, local media reported.

More than 6,000 documents related to the assassination, totaling nearly a quarter-million pages, were posted to the website of the National Archives late Monday afternoon, in what the administration hailed as a triumph of transparency, the New York Times reported.

These do not include FBI wiretap recordings of King and other materials that remain under court seal until 2027, according to experts cited by the US news outlet.

Trump administration officials said the King assassination documents include notes on the leads pursued by investigators, interviews with people who knew his killer, James Earl Ray, and previously unreleased details of interactions with foreign intelligence services during the manhunt for Ray.

Ray pleaded guilty to King’s murder but later renounced that plea and maintained his innocence until he died in 1998.

An estimated 200,000 pages of records released on Monday had been under a court-imposed seal since 1977, when the FBI first gathered the records and turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.

King had a well-documented history of extramarital relationships, said the NYT report.

King’s surviving children, Martin III and Bernice, argued in a statement on Monday that their father had been “relentlessly targeted by an invasive, predatory, and deeply disturbing disinformation and surveillance campaign.” The children beseeched researchers and the general public to view all of the material from the government’s files in the context of their father’s contributions to American society.

In a press release, the Trump administration quoted Alveda King, King’s niece and a high-profile supporter of Trump, who praised the government for providing transparency. “The declassification and release of these documents are a historic step towards the truth that the American people deserve,” she said as cited in the NYT.

In another statement the Martin Luther King jr Centre of which Bernince King is CEO said, “King Center Regarding the Declassification and Release of FBI Files on the Assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Excerpt from Statement: “And so, as we prepare for a heightened focus on Dr. King, we underscore the work central to Dr. King’s dream: engaging Kingian Nonviolence, which The King Center has rebranded as Nonviolence365, for the strategic eradication of the Triple Evils of racism, poverty, and militarism. We invite the global citizenry to join us in working to rid our “World House” of these interconnected, debilitating conundrums. This righteous work should be our collective response to renewed attention on the assassination of a great purveyor of true peace.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said that the documents were released to fulfill the action Trump called for in a January executive order.

(With inputs from ANI)