BERLIN, Jan 3: A German documentary to be aired this week claims to have found new evidence that Lee Harvey Oswald shot US president John F. Kennedy on the orders of the Cuban secret services.

“It was (Cuban leader Fidel) Castro’s vengeance for the CIA bid to assassinate him with a poisoned pen,” award-winning German filmmaker Wilfried Huismann says in the film that will be aired on ARD television on Friday.

Huismann’s film, Rendezvous with Death, features claims by a disgruntled former ally of Castro, Oscar Marino, that Oswald had assassinated Kennedy in a plot hatched by the Cuban secret services in the US state of Florida.

According to the film, Marino fell out with Castro because he believed the communist leader was too close to Moscow.

Huismann claims in his film that Kennedy’s successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, knew about the plot but wanted to avoid a new standoff with Cuba, partly because the US Democrats were seen as incapable of controlling the Castro government.

The film also sheds a different light on Oswald, with one of the investigators who questioned him saying he was not the neurotic loner people believed but a cultured man who was fanatically anti-American.—AFP