Just months ahead of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination a new docudrama is set to spark a fresh debate over who carried out the killing by reviving the theory that JFK was shot accidentally by a secret service agent.

The new film, which will be aired in Australia, the US and Canada this Autumn, is based on the work of investigative writer Colin McLaren and author Bonar Menninger.

It suggests that a Secret Service agent, George Hickey, fired one of the bullets that killed Kennedy after a night partying with colleagues.

Download the new Independent Premium app Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

Hickey, who is now dead, was riding in the car behind Kennedy’s limo that day. “What we’re saying is that we believe it was a tragic accident in the heat of that moment,” McLaren told the Television Critics Association on Sunday, Associated Press reported.

According to the film makers, whose work is based on that of Howard Donahue, who spent 20 years studying the assassination, when Lee Harvey Oswald fired his first shot, Hickey responded by trying to fire back on Oswald’s position using his Secret Service-issued rifle.

Because he was inexperienced with the weapon, and because the car lurched forward suddenly, said shot went awry and accidentally hit Kennedy, who was struck in the neck but quite possibly not fatally wounded by Oswald’s second shot.

“We don’t suggest that he was in any way involved in a conspiracy,” McLaren said of Hickey.

The theory is set to once again revive the debate over who was responsible for the killing of President Kennedy. It is said that as much as 75 per cent of the American public do not believe the official account of the Kennedy assassination.

Theories range from the bizarre to the implausible, including claims that the driver of the Presidential car did it, to claims of a massive criminal conspiracy involving organisations as varied as the CIA, anti-Castro Cuban exile groups and the mafia.

The Warren Commission report into the assassination in the 1960s concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and remains the official explanation of the assassination.

Additional reporting by Associated Press