The state of New York and New York City will pay the men exonerated in Malcolm X’s murder $36 million after officials determined they were wrongly convicted of the 1965 assassination.
Muhammad Aziz, 84, and Khalil Islam, who died in 2009 at age 74, were convicted along with Mujahid Abdul Halim of the civil rights leader’s murder. Malcolm X died when he was shot at the beginning of his speech at the Audubon Ballroom in New York City on Feb. 21, 1965.
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Prosecutors had believed Aziz and Islam were used as muscle for the Nation of Islam. However, the pair maintained their innocence since they were first accused of the crime, and Halim, who admitted to shooting Malcolm X, also insisted his co-defendants were not involved.
All three men were convicted and received life sentences. However, Aziz and Islam were released in the 1980s, and Halim was released in 2020.
Aziz and Islam were later exonerated in November 2021 after the case was reopened in 2020, around the time the Netflix documentary series Who Killed Malcolm X was streaming, according to NBC News.
Investigators on the reopened case found that the FBI failed to share evidence that might have exonerated the pair, including eyewitness descriptions of the gunmen that did not appear to match Islam. The duo asserted they were home at the time of the assassination, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.
The FBI also withheld that a witness who testified against Aziz and Islam was an FBI informant, reports said.
The city agreed to pay $26 million to Aziz and Islam, and the state will pay an additional $10 million.
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“This settlement brings some measure of justice to individuals who spent decades in prison and bore the stigma of being falsely accused of murdering an iconic figure,” a city of New York Law Department spokesperson said on Sunday.
