A question about placing a hit on suspects:

It's says in the rulebook on page 34:

When a player is instructed to place a hit token on a suspect,
he chooses one of the active suspects and places a hit
token on that suspect’s sheet. If a suspect ever has three
hits on his sheet, that suspect is immediately killed. When
a suspect is killed, return all of the evidence, hit, and alibi
tokens on his suspect sheet to their respective piles, and
then turn the suspect sheet facedown.

Then the next paragraph says:

After a suspect is killed, hit tokens may not be removed
from that suspect (although some game effects do allow hit
tokens to be removed from a suspect before he dies).

So my question is pretty obvious. Are the hit tokens removed from the suspect or not? This is clearly a contradiction.

I think it just means that you cannot "un-hit" an already dead character. When the character is killed, you put all the tokens away as they are not needed any more. However, game effects that remove hit tokens cannot be used on this character to bring him back alive again (as that would just be silly).

That makes perfect sense if you word it that way.

But looking at the setting, cloning the suspect before he/she is killed sounds like an awesome idea for conspiracy. A reference for future expansion maybe?

I agree with the Bleached Lizard. I think it is just a clarification for what happens immediately after a suspect is killed: you can't bring him back to life with a card that would allow you to remove one hit. So the 3rd hit is placed, character killed, clarification that no one can save his bacon, clear his sheet and return him to the box. That is how this should all be interpreted.