According to reports, there was a mistake in the 1966 convictions of Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam accused of murdering the civil rights activist Malcolm X in 1965. The New York District Attorney’s Office will present tomorrow a petition of nullity at the New York Supreme Court to absolve these two men, claiming they were falsely sentenced.
Muhammad Abdul Aziz and Khalil Islam, known at the time as Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, spent months in prison on charges of involvement in the death of Malcolm X, who lost his life on February 21, 1965, when three men shot the black leader as he was about to give a speech at a Manhattan auditorium.
In addition to Abdul Aziz and Islam, also charged and sentenced to life imprisonment was Mujahid Abdul Halim (also known as Talmadge Hayer or Thomas Hagan), who during the trial admitted to having participated in the assassination, although he insisted that the other two defendants had nothing to do with it. Islam died in 2009, while the other two are on probation.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, which will go to court accompanied by lawyers and representatives of the Innocence Project, already reported in February 2020 that it was reviewing the Malcolm X case and had met with representatives of the Innocence Project after a Netflix documentary series raised questions about two of the men convicted in the case.
Last February, the activist’s family disclosed that they had received a posthumous confession from a police officer implicating the NYPD and FBI in his murder. Three daughters of Malcolm X, Qubiliah, Ilyasah, and Gamilah Shabazz, requested that authorities reopen the civil rights leader’s case in light of “new evidence” presented by the relative of a deceased undercover police officer named Raymond Wood.
The late officer confessed in a letter before he died that the Police and FBI conspired to “undermine” the civil rights movement and that his mission was to infiltrate it to encourage its leaders and members to commit crimes.
In the letter, signed in 2011, Wood explained that his assignment was “to find evidence of criminal activity so that the FBI could discredit and arrest its leaders,” and that “at the direction” of his superiors, he encouraged its members to “commit criminal acts.”
Wood said he had responsibility for the arrest of two members of Malcolm X’s security detail days before the public speech at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights (Manhattan) neighborhood, where he was shot to death.
About a year before his assassination, Malcolm X had left the Nation of Islam, a group to which the three defendants belonged, prompting death threats from members of that community. EFE
Text courtesy of EFE
Translated by María Isabel Carrasco Cara Chards
Photos from Wikimedia Commons
