The civil rights lawyer William Kunstler moved to reopen the case but was denied. Halim filed affidavits naming four members of the Newark mosque as his partners in the crime. Butler, who is now Muhammad Abdul Aziz, was granted parole in 1985 and still maintains his innocence. Johnson, who became Khalil Islam, died in 2009 Mr. All three men were convicted and received life sentences. Hayer, who later became Mujahid Abdul Halim, admitted his guilt but said the other two men were innocent. Later the police arrested two men from Malcolm’s former Harlem mosque, Norman 3X Butler and Thomas 15X Johnson, both known as enforcers.Īt trial, Mr. Talmadge Hayer, a member of the Nation of Islam from a New Jersey mosque, was arrested fleeing the ballroom, with a clip from a handgun used in the killing. Seconds after Malcolm stepped to the lectern, gunfire rang out, then pandemonium. “And there was for decades a consensus in black communities that we are not going to pick up that rock to see what’s underneath it.” “The vast majority of white opinion at that time was that this was black-on-black crime, and maybe black-extremist-on-black-extremist crime,” said David Garrow, a Pulitzer Prize-winning civil rights historian. Attempts to reopen the case - to uncover the possible roles of the F.B.I., New York Police Department and the Nation of Islam leadership, including Louis Farrakhan - have gotten nowhere. Yet it has never sparked the widespread obsessive interest of the Kennedy assassination or the equally brazen killing of Tupac Shakur. From the Archives: Read The Times’s original report and see the front page from Feb.Timeline of Events: Here’s a look at key moments in the case.The exonerations only deepen the mystery. Questions Linger: Scholars have never accepted the official explanation for Malcolm X’s murder.Read the Motion: A review by the Manhattan district attorney and lawyers for the two men found they did not receive a fair trial.Re-examining the Case: The exonerations of Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam validated long-held doubts about who killed Malcolm X.What to Know About the Assassination of Malcolm Xĭecades after Malcolm X was fatally shot in Manhattan in 1965, two men convicted in the killing were exonerated following a lengthy investigation.

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