FBI investigating deaths from civil rights era

WASHINGTON -- The FBI has reopened investigations of about a dozen decades-old suspicious deaths, officials said Tuesday amid a Justice Department focus on cracking unsolved cases from the nation's civil rights era.

The high-priority cases, which FBI Director Robert S. Mueller described as numbering between 10 and 12, are among an estimated 100 that investigators nationwide are looking at as possible civil rights-related killings.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said many of the cases may be beyond the boundaries of what the federal government can legally prosecute. But they "remain on our radar," he said.

"Much time has passed on these crimes," Gonzales told reporters in Washington. "The wounds they left are deep, and still many of them have not healed. But we are committed to re-examining these cases and doing all we can to bring justice to the criminals who may have avoided punishment for so long."

Addressing civil rights violators, Gonzales said: "You have not gotten away with anything -- we are still on your trail."

Officials declined to release details about which cases have been reopened, or where but said that nearly all are in the South.

Investigators later confirmed, for example, that the unsolved 1946 lynching of four sharecroppers on Moore's Ford Bridge near Monroe, Ga., was among those being investigated.

But they declined to comment on whether another high-profile case was being included -- that of Maceo Snipes, a black World War II veteran who in 1946 was shot in the back by four white men a day after he voted for the first time.

No one was ever arrested in that killing in rural Georgia, about 90 miles south of Atlanta, and there is no evidence a criminal probe in the case was ever opened.

Many of the FBI's cases are also included on a list of 76 homicides suspected of being racially motivated that was compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, based in Montgomery, Ala. Center president Richard Cohen said the government's renewed focus on the cold cases could help uncover what he called "a few burning embers."

Mueller said the FBI began re-examining its old case files over a year ago amid of spate of civil rights cases that were solved.