Malcolm X’s daughters have taken legal action against US police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) over the “intentional” killing of their father.
Malcolm Little, later known as Haj Malik Shabazz and Malcolm X, was a prominent African American civil rights leader until his assassination in 1965. He was also an outspoken Black rights activist and former member of the Nation of Islam.
His daughters filed a lawsuit in Manhattan federal court on Friday, accusing the US law enforcement agencies of intentionally failing to protect their father and preventing efforts to identify his killers.
In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs claim that the US law enforcement agencies knew about threats against their father, but “failed to intervene on his behalf.”
The lawsuit says that the agencies had “intentionally removed their officers from inside the ballroom” before he was shot and left him even more exposed by arresting his security detail in the days before the event.
His daughters also say that the agencies engaged in “fraudulent concealment and cover-up” after Malcolm X’s assassination by hiding information from the family and hamstringing efforts to identify the assassins of the iconic leader of African-American Muslims.
The convictions of two of the three Black men incarcerated over the assassination of Malcolm X were overturned after spending more than 20 years in prison, and they were exonerated from any charges or involvement in the assassination.
The third Black man, Thomas Hagan, 83, aka Mujahid Abdul Halim, confessed to being part of a group that planned and executed the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X in New York City.
He has said that he had help from accomplices but has refused to name them. He was paroled in 2010. Experts suspect he was a victim of a deep undercover operation.
Malcolm X was a Muslim revolutionary human rights activist who counted many powerful authority figures in the United States as his enemies, including FBI director J. Edgar Hoover.
The FBI was closely tracking Malcolm X and had gathered 2,300 pages worth of material on him.
One year before Malcolm X’s assassination, Hoover sent a telegram to the FBI office in New York City ordering the agents there to, “Do something about Malcolm X.”
The FBI and other security services and law enforcement agencies considered him as a threat to White Supremacy in the United States.
