FBI exhumes black lynching victim

Emmett Till was dragged from his bed, beaten and shot in the head

The FBI has started to exhume the body of a black boy whose lynching became a key event in the civil rights movement.

Emmett Till was 14 when he was dragged from his bed at his uncle's home in a small Mississippi town, beaten and shot in the head.

The Chicago boy who was in the south for the first time had wolf-whistled a white woman two days earlier.

Two men were acquitted, but later owned up to the killing. They are now dead, but the FBI has re-opened its inquiry.

The pair, JW Milam and Roy Bryant, were acquitted by an all-white jury, but soon admitted their guilt in a magazine interview.

The justice department said last year it would revisit the murder, citing new evidence.

Mutilated

Forensic experts are expected to perform an autopsy on Till's remains to see if new evidence can lead them to fresh prosecutions.

A documentary made by New York film-maker Keith Beauchamp asserted that accomplices who helped Milam and Bryant abduct and possibly kill the teenager are still alive.

The cause of death was never officially determined

Because a five-year time limit on federal prosecutions has long since passed, any new case will have to be brought under Mississippi state law.

The exhumation, at a cemetery in the Chicago suburbs, began after a short memorial service for family members.

A small forensic tent was erected around the graveside, where work could take up to two days to complete depending on the conditions of the remains and the ground, the FBI said.

Till was asleep at his uncle's house in the Mississippi Delta town of Money when he was abducted on 28 August 1955.

Two days earlier, he had wolf-whistled a woman, who it later emerged was Bryant's wife.

His mutilated body, attached to a heavy metal fan, was recovered three days later from the Tallahatchie River.

The cause of death was never officially determined.

Civil rights leaders persuaded Emmett Till's mother to insist on an open casket at his funeral - a successful attempt to let the world see what racists had done to her son.