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What led to the exoneration of Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam?

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Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam had always asserted their innocence in the assassination of Malcolm X. At the 1966 trial, Mujahid Abdul Halim confessed to being one of the shooters and testified that Aziz and Islam were innocent. It wasn’t until the publication in 2011 of Columbia University historian Manning Marable’s biography Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention and the 2020 Netflix documentary Who Killed Malcolm X?, however, that Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., announced that he would reopen the investigation. After 22 months, Vance and his team announced Aziz and Islam’s exoneration in 2021.