United States President Donald Trump on Thursday ordered over 2,800 files about former President John F Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 to be released, The New York Times reported. A 1992 legislation about the records of the Kennedy assassination case required that the millions of pages of investigation documents be released in 25 years. That period ended on Thursday.

Trump, however, gave six more months’ time to release a few thousand other documents as security agencies wanted them blocked, reportedly in the interest of national security.

Most documents had already been released by the National Archives, but one final batch of around 3,100 documents is still private. The Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation had urged Trump to block their release, a power only the president has. Possible reasons reportedly included protecting the agencies’ work and the identity of informants who might still be alive.

“I am ordering today that the veil finally be lifted,” Trump said in a memorandum on Thursday. “I have no choice – today – but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation’s security.” He ordered the agencies to “be extremely circumspect”, and said that the rationale for continued secrecy of the files has only “grown weaker with the passage of time”.

Kennedy was killed on November 22, 1963, while riding in a presidential motorcade in Dallas, Texas. He was seated next to his wife Jacqueline. A man named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for Kennedy’s murder, but he was shot dead two days later. Oswald had claimed he was framed. There were multiple investigations into the assassination, several with conflicting conclusions.