Three daughters of Malcolm X, a Black empowerment and civil rights icon in the United States, have accused the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the New York Police Department (NYPD) of being in part responsible for their father’s 1965 assassination.

On Friday, the family filed a $100m wrongful-death lawsuit against the three agencies.

The legal action is the latest turn in the decades-long fallout from Malcolm X’s killing, which has prompted many questions but few answers.

He was shot dead in February 1965, when gunmen opened fire on the 39-year-old shortly after he began speaking at an event in the Harlem neighbourhood of New York.

Friday’s lawsuit charges that a “corrupt, unlawful, and unconstitutional” relationship between law enforcement and the “ruthless killers” allowed for the assassination.

The ties between the government agencies and the killers “went unchecked for many years and was actively concealed, condoned, protected, and facilitated by government agents”, the lawsuit alleges.

The suit further claims that the government agencies took several missteps that allowed for the killing to unfold.

The NYPD, coordinating with federal law enforcement, had arrested Malcolm X’s security detail just days before the assassination. The police force also intentionally removed officers from inside the ballroom, according to the suit.

Plus, the court filing says, the federal agencies had undercover personnel in the ballroom at the time of the attack, but the officers failed to intervene.

Speaking at a news conference on Friday, civil rights attorney Ben Crump summed up the family’s claim.

“We believe that they all conspired to assassinate Malcolm X, one of the greatest thought leaders of the 20th century,” Crump said.

He added he hoped law enforcement officials would read the lawsuit “and learn all the dastardly deeds that were done by their predecessors and try to right these historic wrongs”.

The CIA and FBI have not commented on the lawsuit. The NYPD, meanwhile, has previously said it does not comment on pending litigation.

Decades of speculation

Malcolm X was born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska. He initially gained prominence as the national spokesperson of the Nation of Islam, changing his name to el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz later in life.

His Black revolutionary messaging drew attention from federal intelligence agencies, and he was closely monitored throughout his career as an activist and public figure.

Eventually, he broke from the Nation of Islam and became more closely aligned with the more mainstream civil rights movement. After his assassination, three men were arrested and found guilty of his murder.

In 2020, then-Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced a review of the initial investigation into Malcolm’s X killing, which had long attracted the interest of historians and amateur sleuths.

Two years later, two of the three men convicted – Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam – were acquitted after the probe found that prosecutors, the FBI and the NYPD had withheld evidence that may have cleared them of culpability.

The conviction of a third man, Mujahid Abdul Halim, was not overturned.

Prosecutors had maintained that the trio – all members of the Nation of Islam – had killed Malcolm X in retribution for his acrimonious split from the group a year earlier.

The review did not identify the actual killer or uncover a wider collusion between the attackers and the government.

However, it drew attention to the fact that law enforcement was aware that the Nation of Islam was targeting Malcolm X after they firebombed his home a week before his killing.

It also revealed, as stated in Friday’s lawsuit, that authorities did not disclose the presence of undercover agents at the time of the attack.

In addition, NYPD files showed a New York Daily News reporter received an apparent tip about the killing shortly before it occurred.

The lawsuit filed on Friday argued that Malcolm X’s family suffered the “pain of the unknown” in the decades after his killing.

“They did not know who murdered Malcolm X, why he was murdered, the level of NYPD, FBI and CIA orchestration, the identity of the governmental agents who conspired to ensure his demise, or who fraudulently covered-up their role,” the lawsuit said.

“The damage caused to the Shabazz family is unimaginable, immense, and irreparable.”