An 85-year-old man who was exonerated for the murder of civil rights activist Malcolm X is suing the FBI on allegations that the agency hid evidence of the onetime Nation of Islam leader’s actual killers and proof of his innocence.
The $40 million lawsuit filed by Muhammad Aziz alleges that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including then-Director J. Edgar Hoover, “intentionally caused the presentation of false evidence against…concealed a trove of evidence…and orchestrated fundamentally unfair legal proceedings against Mr. Aziz.”
He claims the agency engineered this cover-up to protect and preserve “the scope, nature, and activities” of its counterintelligence operations while simultaneously weakening the civil rights movement.
At Hoover’s behest, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, also known as COINTELPRO, enabled agents to infiltrate U.S. political and social movements. Hoover’s aim was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” Black activist groups, according to one decades-old FBI report.
The suit also claims the FBI carried out concerted efforts alongside the New York Police Department to suppress the integrity of the investigation into Malcolm X’s murder and exchanged a network of information and evidence.
Aziz, a U.S. Navy veteran, was a 26-year-old father of two at the time he was arrested for Malcolm X’s death alongside another accused killer, Khalil Islam. The civil rights leader was murdered on Feb. 21, 1965, as he was preparing to give a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Upper Manhattan.
Aziz spent 20 years in prison after his conviction. Islam served 22 years but died in prison in 2009. Islam’s estate filed a companion $40 million lawsuit. Their lawsuits claim that both men were “attractive targets” to pin the crime on because of their affiliation with the Nation of Islam and also because they didn’t have many alibi witnesses.
Both weren’t declared innocent until November 2021 after their attorneys worked hand in hand with New York County district attorneys and the Innocence Project to prove that Aziz and Islam were wrongfully convicted.
In a hearing to vacate their convictions, then-District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. claimed that FBI employees and the New York Police Department “intentionally concealed” records of witnesses — some of whom were FBI informants — “who failed to identify Mr. Islam and implicated other subjects and suspects.”
Mujahid Abdul Halim, one of the men who shot Malcolm X, testified in 1966 that Aziz and Islam had nothing to do with the murder. Halim confessed that he and four other men were involved in the fatal shooting but never identified his co-conspirators.
However, Aziz’s suit alleges that the FBI concealed evidence pointing to another suspect named William Bradley, who fired a shotgun blast at Malcolm X because the agency had a “significant ongoing relationship” with Bradley.
Aziz and Islam both told police they were at home at the time with their families. Aziz was home recovering from a leg injury that he sustained after being beaten by police officers a month before Malcolm X’s murder, the suit stated.
The complaint also alleges that the FBI coerced witnesses into “giving false and materially misleading statements to prosecutors and in their sworn testimony” and claims that the weapon Halim used to shoot Malcolm X was recovered by an FBI informant named Ronald Timberlake. Timberlake reportedly delivered the gun to the FBI, and agents then handed it off to the NYPD.
New York City and the state of New York did award $26 million to Aziz and Islam’s estate to settle lawsuits over misconduct from police and Manhattan district attorneys in their convictions.
