Two men convicted in 1966 for the assassination a year earlier in New York of Malcolm X, a figure in the fight for civil rights, will be exonerated, the Manhattan prosecutor’s office announced on Wednesday.
“These men were not given the justice they deserved,” prosecutor Cyrus Vance Jr. said on Wednesday in the New York Times, while his office confirmed that a press conference would be held Thursday on the “overturning of two wrongful convictions for the murder of Malcolm X”.
Crucial evidence concealed at the time
According to New York Times, they are Muhammad A. Aziz, 83, released from prison in 1985, and Khalil Islam, released after serving his sentence in 1987 and died in 2009. According to the New York daily, “the 22-month investigation conducted jointly by the attorney’s office and the two men’s attorneys reveals that prosecutors, “the FBI, and the New York Police (NYPD)” concealed crucial evidence which, if known, would probably have led to the acquittal of the two men ”.
In February 2020, after the broadcast of a documentary on Netflix (Who Killed Malcolm X?), Cyrus Vance had asked his teams to reconsider the case. “What we can do is recognize this mistake, the seriousness of this mistake,” added Cyrus Vance.