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FBI investigates black man hanging KKK style

An African-American has been found hanging execution style akin to the extra-judicial public execution style of white racists of Mississippi in the 60s.

Otis Byrd is suspected to have been executed by white racists.

A 54-year-old black man, Otis Byrd, has been found hanging from a tree in a field close to his house in Claiborne County, western Mississippi, USA, an area where black hatred and lynching was prevalent before the segregation of the 1960s.

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The hanging of Byrd, according to authorities, was in the same manner the dreaded white racist group, Ku Klux Klan (KKK), hung African-Americans back then and this has set the FBI investigators on the alert.

FBI spokesman Jason Pack said that Byrd who had not been seen since March 2, 2015, had gone missing in a wooded area in Claiborne County. His body was found during a search by local law enforcement officers.

The Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), identified the dead man as Byrd, and called for a swift and thorough federal investigation into his death.

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NAACP president for the Mississippi State Conference, Derrick Johnson, said:

"Mr Byrd was found hung in a tree, and because of that we want to ensure it was not in fact a racial hate crime."

A cause of death has not been determined and authorities are unclear whether the man was killed or took his own life.

Lynching, or extra-judicial public execution by hanging, was once a common practice in parts of the US in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

By one estimate, some 3,500 African Americans and 1,300 whites were lynched from 1882 to 1968.

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