A new digitally enhanced video version of an amateur film showing President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963 was released yesterday for sale at $19.96.
The video shows Kennedy's last seconds in Dallas in horrifying detail. Parents are being advised not to allow young children view it.
The 45-minute video, called Image of an Assassination: a new look at the Zapruder film, contains six separate showings of Kennedy's head disintegrating as it is struck by the bullet which an official inquiry found was fired by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22nd, 1963.
Mr Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dressmaker, had climbed a wall to film the Kennedy cavalcade. He later sold the rights of the film to Life magazine.
Time-Life eventually sold the film back to a Zapruder family company, LMH Co, for a token payment of one dollar in 1975.
The 26 seconds of the Zapruder film have often been seen in a fuzzy colour version over the years, usually in a pirated version of the original, which is now held in the National Archives in Washington.
Some 40 minutes of the video is a technical explanation of how the film was digitally enhanced. It ends with slow motion images of the bullet shattering the president's skull.
Some critics of the Warren Commission, which said that Oswald alone fired the shots, claim that the new video shows there was a second marksman. A historian from the University of Wisconsin, Mr David Crone, says: "The film shows that the murder of John Kennedy was beyond the capacity of a single individual."
But Mr David Belin, former counsel to the Warren Commission, has said he told USA Today that no matter what the film seemed to show, "we have the actual bullet which killed Kennedy and it was proved to come from Oswald's rifle".
The Zapruder family is still negotiating with the US government over payment for the film, which has been ruled to belong to the American people. The family of Mr Zapruder, who died in 1970, has been asking for $18 million but the government is reluctant to pay more than $3 million.
The family co-operated with a video company to make the new, enhanced $350,000 version. Each of the 480 frames was developed separately and digitally enhanced to improve the quality of the original 8mm film. So far the Kennedy family has refrained from commenting on the availability of the film.
Guardian Service adds:
The Zapruder family has dismissed suggestions it is attempting to profit from the assassination. The family says it is desperate to be rid of the burden of deciding who should get access to the film and for how much, and that it needs to recoup the estimated $350,000 spent on preserving and administering it for the past 35 years.