"FBI, New York police behind killing of US Muslim leader 'Malcolm X'" - says family

AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): The family of Malcolm X have revealed a letter written by a deceased police officer stating that the FBI and New York Police Department (NYPD) were behind the 1965 killing of the and prominent civil right activist.

Malcolm X was a powerful speaker who rose to prominence as the national spokesman of the Nation of Islam, an African-American Muslim group.

He spent more than a decade with the group before becoming disillusioned and publicly breaking with it in 1964. He moderated some of his earlier views on the benefits of racial separation.

Malcolm X was killed at New York’s Audubon Ballroom while preparing to deliver a speech.

The letter released at a news conference on Saturday was attributed to a former undercover NYPD officer named Raymond Wood.

Raymond Wood's cousin, Reggie Wood, joined some of Malcolm X’s daughters at the news conference at the site where the Audubon Ballroom once stood to make the letter public.

Raymond Wood’s letter stated that he had been pressured by his NYPD supervisors to lure two members of Malcolm X’s security detail into committing crimes that resulted in their arrest just days before the fatal shooting.

Those arrests kept the two men from managing door security at the ballroom and was part of conspiracy between the NYPD and FBI to have Malcolm killed, according to the letter.

Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz said she had always lived with uncertainty around the circumstances of her father’s death.

“Any evidence that provides greater insight into the truth behind that terrible tragedy should be thoroughly investigated,” she told the news conference.

Some historians and scholars have stated that the wrong men were convicted. Manhattan’s District Attorney last year said it would review the convictions in the case.



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