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100 murder cases from US civil rights era reopened

The white jailers who beat second world war veteran William Owens to death in a North Carolina prison in 1956 were never arrested. Nor was the police officer who shot dead unarmed black teenager Larry Bolden on a Tennessee street two years later.

Until Tuesday, they were just two of dozens of unsolved cases from America's civil rights era, fading over time.

But in a development observers see as part of a mood of reconciliation and introspection sweeping the US, the Justice Department and FBI are to re-examine almost 100 murders from 11 southern states during the 1950s and 1960s suspected of being racially motivated.

It comes in the same week that the state of Virginia apologised for its actions during the slavery era and follows the recent convictions of several former members of the Ku Klux Klan for the murders of young black activists decades ago.

US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzalez said his department would team up with the FBI, several black advocacy organisations and the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Centre, a hate-crime monitoring group, to see if further prosecutions could be pursued.

News of the probes came on the same day that a grand jury in Jackson, Mississippi, declined to issue an indictment through lack of evidence in the case of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old shot to death by white assailants in 1955 for whistling at a white girl.

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