NEW YORK: Nearly 60 years after Malcolm X’s assassination at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan, his family filed a federal lawsuit Friday claiming that the New York police department, CIA and FBI played a role in his killing.
The lawsuit, filed in Manhattan and seeking “in excess of $100 million” in damages, claims that the agencies knew about threats against the civil rights leader but “failed to intervene on his behalf”. It says they had “intentionally removed their officers from inside the ballroom” before he was shot and left him even more exposed by arresting his security detail in the days before the event.
The family also claims that the agencies engaged in “fraudulent concealment and cover-up” after Malcolm X’s death by keeping information from his family and hamstringing efforts to identify his killers. Three men were arrested and convicted in the killing. But after spending more than 20 years in prison, two of them – Muhammad A. Aziz and Khalil Islam – were exonerated. (The third, Thomas Hagan, was parolled in 2010.)
Malcolm X rose to prominence in the Nation of Islam, the black nationalist group, and became an at times controversial but fiery leader. A year before his killing, he had left the Nation of Islam and started Organisation of Afro-American Unity.
On February 21, 1965, as he began to speak about the new group, 3 gunmen rushed the stage and shot him in front of his pregnant wife and three of his daughters. He was 39. For decades, historians cast doubt on official accounts and on guilt of Aziz and Islam. A probe found in 2021 that prosecutors, police and FBI had withheld key evidence at the time.
