Details are expected to be released today about the dumping at sea of the bronze coffin in which the body of assassinated president John F. Kennedy was brought back from Dallas to Washington on November 22nd, 1963.
The president was later buried in a mahogany coffin at Arlington Cemetery, but the whereabouts of the bronze coffin, which had a handle damaged during the transport of the body, remained a mystery.
Author William Manchester is said to have been given permission to view it in a Government warehouse as part of his research into the assassination.
According to the Washington Post, the release by the National Archives today of 50,000 pages of CIA documents relating to Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed assassin of President Kennedy, will also contain 43 pages on the fate of the bronze coffin.
It is said to have been flown in a military aircraft and dumped into the Atlantic Ocean off the Maryland-Delaware coast in 9,000 feet of water. The area is used as a military dump site.
Mr Kermit L. Hall, a historian with the Assassination Records Review Board, which is now abolished, told Associated Press that the exact site had been recorded. He said that the coffin was dumped because it might become the object of morbid curiosity. There is also said to have been pressure from the then Mayor of Dallas, Mr Earle Cabell, to dispose of the coffin.
Varying views are being expressed about the significance of the fate of the original coffin. Mr David Lifton, a Los Angeles historian who has specialised in irregularities in the investigation into the Kennedy assassination, has said that any forensic evidence in the coffin should have been preserved.
Mr William Joyce of Princeton University, who was a member of the now defunct review board, has said that it was "very doubtful" if the information about the disposal of the coffin conferred any additional meaning on the assassination.
Cuba's capital, Havana, was awash yesterday with scores of US boats completing a controversial race from Tampa Bay that crossed the short waters but huge political gulf between the two estranged nations. Around 250 US craft with an estimated 1,500 sailors, took part in the largest Havana Cup regatta in the seven-decade history of the race.