UNITED STATES – Incredible twist in the painful history of African Americans in the United States: on Thursday, November 18, a New York judge cleared two men convicted of the 1965 murder of Malcom X, icon of the cause black people.
To the applause of the New York Supreme Court courtroom, Justice Ellen Biben called a “failure of justice” the conviction over half a century ago of Muhammad Aziz, aka Norman 3X Butler, now 83 years old and present at court, and Khalil Islam, alias Thomas 15X Johnson, who died in 2009.
She legally exonerated the two men after filing an annulment request by Manhattan prosecutor Cyrus Vance and the defense. The New York prosecutor, who will step down at the end of the year, has offered “apologies” from the American judicial authorities for “decades of injustice” and “unacceptable violations of the law and of the trust of the United States. ‘public opinion”.
“Serious judicial error”
Who then shot Malcolm X on February 21, 1965, when he came up to the platform of the Audubon Ballroom, a performance hall in Harlem?
Until today’s turnaround, unveiled Wednesday by Cyrus Vance, the official thesis, often questioned, retained three culprits, members at the time of the “Nation of Islam” movement and condemned by American justice in 1966.
In a rather rare alliance, prosecutor Vance, the team of lawyers for the two former convicts and the organization “The Innocence Project”, which fights against miscarriages of justice, had filed a motion for annulment in the Supreme Court of the United States. New York State.
Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, 42 years in prison between them, have always claimed their innocence. The third convict, Mujahid Abdul Halim, alias Talmadge X Hayer at the time, admitted to having shot Malcolm X and had his two co-accused exonerated, to no avail.
It was not until early 2020, and the broadcast of a documentary on Netflix (Who Killed Malcolm X?), renewing doubts about their very presence at the scene of the assassination, so that justice takes up the case again.
Attorney Vance’s finding is final. American justice “will not be able to return what was taken from these men” but “what we can do is recognize this error, the seriousness of this error”, he promised.
“I don’t need the court, these prosecutors or a piece of paper to tell me that I am innocent,” Muhammad Aziz told the audience. Wearing handsome in an elegant khaki ensemble, he denounced a “corrupt system to the core that black people know all too well in 2021”.
Before the Supreme Court, Cyrus Vance referred to “many documents” that his predecessors “did not have in 1965”, including “FBI reports of witnesses” implicating other suspects. His team also heard from a new witness, an 80-year-old man living in Brooklyn, who provided a strong alibi for Muhammad Aziz, claiming he called him at his home on the phone right after the assassination.
Cyrus Vance also revealed that “on the orders” of then-almighty FBI boss Edgar Hoover, the FBI had ordered multiple witnesses not to reveal to police or prosecutors that they were, in fact, informants ”from the police.
Malcolm X threatened
This reversal of history and justice revives the thesis of the troubled role played by the FBI and the New York police at the time, already fueled by the posthumous letter of a police officer in February 2021. The latter affirmed s ‘to be brought closer, at the request of his hierarchy, to the entourage of Malcolm X and to have trapped two of his bodyguards, arrested only a few days before the assassination, to weaken the security around the leader.
At the time of his assassination, Malcolm X, 39, a controversial figure of the African-American cause, accused by his detractors of calling for violence and separatism, had left “Nation of Islam” and made a turn towards a more consensual discourse. .
He was the subject of numerous threats from members of his former movement and his home in Queens, New York, had been the target of an attack days earlier.
The Netflix documentary builds on the thesis of unprofessional Washington historian Abdur-Rahman Muhammad arguing that the first two convicts are innocent and that the third, who admitted the facts, acted with four other members of the “Nation of Islam” from a mosque in Newark, New Jersey, near New York.
The murder of Malcolm X shook the United States, symbolizing the political and social tensions of the country in the 1960s, also marked by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and of an even more prominent figure in the defense. of Civil Rights, Martin Luther King, in 1968.
See also on The HuffPost: Video parodying the murder of AOC: Paul Gosar, close to Trump, gets reprimanded in Congress
–
