Two Black men wrongly convicted of Malcolm X murder to receive $36 million

The two black men, who were exonerated last year for the 1965 assassination of US Islamic civil rights leader Malcolm X, will receive 36 million dollar from the city and state of New York.

The two men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, who always maintained they did not commit the murder, spent over 20 years in prison.

They were released in the mid-1980s, but it was not until November 2021 that their names were fully cleared by the New York State Supreme Court.

The high court called their convictions almost a half-century ago “a failure of justice”.

The men’s attorney, David Shanies, confirmed on Sunday that the city of New York will pay $26 million to be split between 84-year-old Aziz and the family of Islam, who died in 2009.

The state government of New York will also pay them five million dollars each, for a total of $36 million in compensation.

“The tragedy of Malcolm X’s murder was felt all over the world, and compounded by the fact that it led to the convictions and imprisonment of two innocent, young, Black men in America,” Shanies said.

“Today we acknowledge that injustice and take a modest step towards rectifying it,” he added.

A spokesman for the New York City Law Department, Nick Paolucci, told the New York Times that 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.”

Malcolm X, an outspoken Muslim advocate of Black rights, was 39 when he was gunned down, as he was prepared to give a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, on February 21, 1965.

Last year, new evidence emerged suggesting that the New York Police Department and the FBI had been behind the assassination.

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