FBI releases censored file on Michael Jackson

Journalists who pressed for the declassification of FBI files on Michael Jackson, put together in a decade-long bid to build a case against the singer over allegations of molesting young boys, are angry after the material was finally released - but heavily censored.

Yesterday the FBI made public 333 pages of a 679-page dossier on seven investigations involving Jackson, who died in June, aged 50. But despite applications by several American news outlets under US freedom of information laws, more than half of the file remains secret.

The documents - compiled between 1992 and 2005 - fail to shed any new light on the singer's 1993 and 2004 child molestation cases that helped wreck his career. The files contain no information at all about Jackson's death - classified by the coroner as homicide - or the ongoing manslaughter investigation of the singer's physician Dr Conrad Murray.

Journalists, hoping for insights into the lifestyle of one of the world's most famous eccentrics, were bitterly disappointed by the documents, which were denounced by the Los Angeles Times as "more snooze than sizzle".

"More somnolent than sensational, [the FBI's] 333 pages is a collection of photocopied tabloid articles and heavily redacted reports from investigations that were old news years ago," wrote Los Angeles Times journalists Harriet Ryan and Kimi Yoshino.

They added: "What one could glean from the voluminous file were the type of things his many biographers would probably relegate to footnotes - or not include at all."

These include a copy of an expired driving licence - showing that Jackson was the type of person who smiled for mug shots - and that a "male chimp", Bubbles, the singer's pet chimpanzee, came up in the 1993 investigation into a 13-year-old boy's allegations that Jackson molested him.

The bulk of the declassified papers - nearly 200 pages - concerns an unnamed man who made death threats against Jackson, as well as President George HW Bush, and crime boss John Gotti. The man threatened that he would "personally attempt to kill [Jackson] if he doesn't pay me my money"; he also wrote that he would "commit mass murder" at one of the singer's concerts if necessary to kill him. The FBI said that the man pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison in 1993. ·