They served 20 and 22 years respectively in prison for the murder of black activist Malcolm X in 1965. On Thursday, the New York chief prosecutor asked the court to acquit Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam — a request that was promptly granted. by the judge. For Islam it means posthumous rehabilitation. He was released early in 1987 and died in 2009.
The revision takes one of the most startling murder cases in the wild American civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Not only because of the rehabilitation of two wrongly convicted men, but especially because of the shrill light that falls on the then investigation by the police and the judiciary. At the time, the FBI had serious clues as to who the main shooter had been, but did not share that information with the prosecution. The New York Police Department did not disclose that they had an undercover agent in Malcolm X’s organization who had been on the scene during the assassination attempt. This infiltrator was not called as a witness at the time. All this would have led to acquittal in a new trial, according to the Public Prosecution Service in the review investigation.
Chief Officer Cyrus Vance Jr. offered his apologies in the American media on Wednesday on behalf of the investigative device. That had failed for the two men and their families. The reparation doesn’t make up for those mistakes, Vance said. “But what we can do is recognize the gravity of the error.”
Radical Opponent
Malcolm X had rapidly become known in the 1960s as the radical anti-peace of the peaceful activist Martin Luther King. While in prison, he had converted to Islam and had sought support from the Nation of Islam, a movement led by Elijah Muhammad. In the fight for the rights of black Americans, Malcolm X – the “X” was already a form of protest against the slave name given to his ancestors – took the position that strictly nonviolent action against the regular violent crackdown by the police and white citizens was insufficient to emancipate African-American citizens.
The more popular Malcolm X became, the greater the tensions between him and the Nation of Islam. He alluded several times to the possibility of attacks from that angle. A week before the murder, unknown persons had already set his house on fire with Molotov cocktails. While speaking at New York’s Audubon Theater, he was shot at by multiple gunmen, one of whom fired a sawed-off shotgun. One of the gunmen was arrested on the spot. He stated during police interrogations and on the witness stand that the other two suspects were innocent – they hadn’t even been to the theater that day – and named four other co-offenders. The police never investigated those persons further.
80-year-old Mujahid Abdul Halim, as the convicted convict is now called, was asked on Thursday about his reaction to the rehabilitation of his two innocent fellow prisoners. “Thank God, they’ve been exonerated.”
Over the years, attempts have been made, in books and in proceedings, to exonerate the two. The court rejected the request for reopening in previous instances. The investigation, completed this week, has identified no new suspects. Last year Netflix aired a documentary, Who Killed Malcolm X?, in which amateur researcher Abdur-Rahman Muhammad came across William Bradley, now renamed Al Mustafa Shabazz, as the man with the sawed-off rifle. Shabazz died in 2018. It is not yet clear who may have ordered the murder.
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