In new $40M lawsuit, man cleared of Malcolm X slay blames FBI for hiding evidence of real killers

An innocent man exonerated in the assassination of Malcolm X says in a $40 million lawsuit that the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover hid evidence pointing to the real killer to protect the agency’s undercover operations to undermine the civil rights movement.

In a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Thursday, Muhammad Aziz, 85, describes a string of FBI reports and evidence bolstering his innocence in the 1965 Audubon Ballroom killing, and lays out how Hoover and the FBI kept that evidence secret during his trial and for years after.

“FBI employees concealed this information for the purposes of…  protecting and concealing the scope, nature, and activities of its domestic ‘Counterintelligence Program,’ also called ‘COINTELPRO,’ and to divert blame from individuals whom certain FBI employees did not want to see prosecuted for their crimes,” Aziz’s lawsuit alleges.

Through COINTELPRO, the FBI infiltrated and co-opted domestic political and social movements, with Hoover directing the bureau to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, and otherwise neutralize” Black activist groups.

Aziz, a U.S. Navy veteran who served multiple tours of duty, was 26 and a father of two when he was arrested for Malcolm X’s murder. He and his late co-defendant, Khalil Islam, were railroaded in a Manhattan Supreme Court trial rife with misconduct. Islam’s estate filed a similar lawsuit Thursday.

Aziz spent 20 years in prison, and Islam, who died in 2009, served 22 years. Both men were exonerated in 2021 after an investigation by then Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance’s office.

Last year, the city and state agreed to pay Aziz and Islam’s estate $36 million in settlement money.

“The worst offender of all was the FBI, and they have never acknowledged their role in this case let alone done anything to atone for it,” Aziz’s lawyer, David Shanies, told the Daily News. “It’s about compensating a person whose life was destroyed, and that’s something no about of money can fix.”

Three gunman, one of them using a shotgun, murdered Malcolm X on Feb, 21, 1965, inside the Washington Heights Ballroom in front of a horrified crowd of 400 that included NYPD and FBI informants and undercover officers.

One of the killers, Mujahid Abdul Halim, was captured by a group of civilians as he fled the scene.

Police arrested Aziz and Islam days later, even though the FBI had evidence pointing to another suspect, a Nation of Islam leader named William Bradley, as the man holding the shotgun, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit refers to “evidence of a significant ongoing relationship between Bradley and the FBI,” and is seeking to unearth those ties.

Bradley, who died in 2018, denied his involvement in the killing.