It is time to hold the FBI accountable for its crimes | Opinions - By Steve Downs, Former Chief Attorney for The NY State Commission on Judicial Conduct | Shared News Links
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Former Chief Attorney for The NY State Commission on Judicial Conduct
On November 18, a New York judge threw out the convictions of Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, 55 years after the two men were convicted of the February 1965 assassination of Malcolm X. A two-year investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office revealed that both the New York Police Department and the FBI failed to disclose exculpatory information about the men, which likely would have led to their acquittal.
Judge Ellen Biben, who presided over the hearing, spoke about the “serious miscarriages of justice”, while district attorney, Cyrus Vance, apologised for “serious unacceptable violations of the law and the public trust” by the FBI and the NYPD, and stated that the defendants did not receive a fair trial and their convictions must be vacated.
The men’s exoneration was not a surprise. Historians, journalists, and legal scholars have known for decades that the two men were innocent, while the men themselves have long maintained their innocence. The surprise was that the NYPD and FBI had kept silent about their exculpatory information, apparently content to see two innocent men framed and incarcerated for decades for a crime they did not commit. Black and other marginalised communities have also learned over the decades not to trust the FBI, given the agency’s well-documented history of targeting and animus against them.
Yet, this shocking perversion of justice raises serious questions: Were the real killers working with the FBI? And is that why the FBI withheld the information? What does it say that the only witnesses who placed Aziz and Islam at the scene of the crime were FBI informants? We do not know the answers because the NYPD and FBI still lack transparency.
The hidden exculpatory evidence was presumably gathered covertly as part of the notorious FBI counterintelligence programme from the 1950s to the 1970s known as COINTELPRO. It sought to “neutralise” Black power leaders through illegal tactics such as surveillance, infiltration, and disruption. For those familiar with these abuses and this era more broadly, the FBI’s questionable role in this case was unsurprising.
US Representative Bobby Rush, a former Black Panther leader from Chicago, immediately pointed the finger at the FBI for the wrongful convictions. In a November 18 statement, he said, “I am struck by this most dastardly and evil fact that two men suffered decades of imprisonment as a result of the active collaboration and treachery of J Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Malcolm X was a shining example of Black American manhood and humanity. For his opposite, J Edgar Hoover – a low life – to be at the centre of his assassination is indeed an American tragedy and flies in the face of Malcolm’s high ethical standards. There are still questions that must be answered regarding Malcolm’s assassination. Who knew what, and when did they know it?”
Indeed, if the FBI had a hand in Malcolm X’s assassination, it would not be their first assassination. The FBI has now paid substantial damages for participating in the COINTELPRO assassinations of Black Panther Party activists Fred Hampton and Mark Clark on December 4, 1969. And the FBI has acknowledged allowing Black Panther leader Geronimo Pratt to be convicted of murder in 1972 and spending almost 30 years in jail, while they silently held evidence from their COINTELPRO surveillance that he was 400 miles (640km) away at the time of the murder.
The “discovery” of exculpatory material in Malcolm X’s murder suggests that the FBI must immediately conduct an independent review of all their COINTELPRO files to determine what other cases might be affected and what other innocent defendants might be freed.
The lack of transparency about Malcolm X’s murder becomes even more troubling when we consider the FBI’s conduct in the war on terror. After the 9/11 attacks, the FBI was tasked with preventing the next attack supposedly being organised by vast networks of terrorists in the US.
The FBI used the broad powers of the national security apparatus to surveil Muslims and other marginalised communities, and soon discovered that there were virtually no terrorist networks in the US. All of the surveillance that went on for some two decades failed to uncover a single terrorist plot.
Yet instead of declaring that terrorism was not coming from the American-Muslim community, the FBI set out to manufacture terrorists from innocent Muslims to prove their false premise of a looming threat. Hundreds of Muslims were preemptively prosecuted, charged for engaging in constitutionally-protected activities like speech or charity. Others were entrapped by offers of money, or suffered from mental illness and were manipulated into to participating in FBI terrorism schemes.
The FBI placed innocent Muslims on the no-fly list, in order to force them to become informants against their own communities. It is now reported that the FBI’s secret informants committed more than 22,000 crimes during the last decade which cost taxpayers $42m on average per year.
Former FBI agent and whistleblower Terry Albury said about his time investigating Muslims:
“There is this mythology surrounding the war on terrorism, and the F.B.I., that has given agents the power to ruin the lives of completely innocent people based solely on what part of the world they come from, or what religion they practice or the color of their skin. And I did that. I helped to destroy people. For 17 years […] We’ve built this entire apparatus and convinced the world that there is a terrorist in every mosque and that every newly arrived Muslim immigrant is secretly anti-American, and because we have promoted that false notion, we have to validate it […] It was made very clear from Day 1 that the enemy was not just a tiny group of disaffected Muslims. Islam itself was the enemy […] I have serious and legitimate concerns about the FBI’s tactics in the Muslim community as it pertains to entrapment, baseless investigation, and intimidation of prospective informants. I am also deeply concerned with its institutional policies that turn a blind eye to the daily denial of the most basic freedoms we all hold dear.”
In practice, the FBI’s policies had disastrous effects on Muslim communities. When it became known that mosques and their members were under intense electronic and physical surveillance, Muslims were forced to self-censor, avoiding conversations with strangers or even close friends who might be FBI informants, or struggling about what to share on social media.
Families of Muslims wrongfully accused of terrorism were often shunned by their communities. Careers were destroyed by false FBI accusations and lengthy incarcerations. Yet the FBI was able to blame their own terrorist plots on the Muslim community and make it appear that Muslims were disloyal and violent.
The exoneration of Malcolm X’s falsely accused killers underscores just how long the FBI has operated without transparency and effective oversight to impede justice and destroy lives. Forcing innocent men to serve decades in prison by withholding exculpatory evidence that would have set them free has never been acceptable.
Now is the time for a thorough re-assessment of the FBI’s legacy from COINTELPRO to the war on terror. One step towards accountability would be through the passage of Rush’s bill, the COINTELPRO Full Disclosure Act, which would compel the FBI and other government agencies to release all records related to the COINTELPRO operation.
Finally, it is time to install independent oversight such as a conviction review unit in the Department of Justice to ensure that the FBI protects all US residents and citizens equally, and does not scapegoat those who are least able to defend themselves.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
- Former Chief Attorney for The NY State Commission on Judicial ConductSteve Downs is a former Chief Attorney for The NY State Commission on Judicial Conduct and currently the Board Chair of the Coalition for Civil Freedoms, an organisation that advocates for persons unfairly targeted and prosecuted in the war on terror.
Regularly compared to Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, Dr. Wouter Basson was in charge of a top-secret South African biological warfare program behind numerous killings, poisonings, and kidnappings in the 1980s.
“Medicine is my profession; war is my hobby.” While you might not expect words like these to come from the mouth of a cardiologist, Dr. Wouter Basson of South Africa is no ordinary medical practitioner. In fact, when Basson oversaw his government’s top-secret Project Coast during the 1980s, it was his job to develop biological weapons intended to initiate a state-sponsored genocide.
Among other acts of terror, this apartheid-era program worked on “race-specific” bioweapons designed to either pacify, sterilize, or even kill South African’s non-white populations. After apartheid ended in the 1990s, the country’s new leadership declared, “If ever there was a program that truly typified the genocidal programs of the apartheid regime, this was it.”
Despite such atrocities, Basson was only first introduced to the world outside South Africa in a 2001 article by The New Yorker titled “The Poison Keeper.”
“South Africans call him Dr. Death,” the article began. “He’s a decorated former Army brigadier and, in civilian life, an eminent cardiologist, and was the founder and leader of Project Coast, a top-secret chemical and biological warfare program.”
But even after coming to international attention for perpetrating some of the worst of apartheid’s horrors, Dr. Wouter Basson got away with it all.
How Wouter Basson Blossomed In The Apartheid Era
ANNA ZIEMINSKI/AFP via Getty ImagesDr. Wouter Basson waves as he arrives at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearing where victims and perpetrators gathered after the end of apartheid to provide testimony and undergo questioning. 1998.
Apartheid, which is Afrikaans for “apartness,” was a system of political and economic discrimination waged against non-Europeans during the era of white minority rule in South Africa. Introduced in South Africa in 1948, apartheid forced non-white racial groups to live separately from Europeans and attempted to halt any social integration between racial groups.
South African president F.W. de Klerk repealed most apartheid legislation in the early 1990s and a new constitution that enfranchised non-white South Africans went into effect in 1994, formally ending the institutionalized racism. That same year also saw the establishment of a coalition black-majority government that led to Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as the country’s first black president.
But back in the days of apartheid, South Africa was rife with state-sponsored racism — and Wouter Basson was one of the men who put that into practice.
Dr. Wouter Basson was born on July 6, 1950, near Cape Town, South Africa. He graduated medical school from the University of Pretoria in 1974 and joined the South African Defense Force (SADF, the country’s armed forces) in 1975.
By the early 1980s, Dr. Basson had risen to the rank of major and was asked to head the SADF’s top-secret chemical and biological weapons program. He accepted and headed that program, Project Coast, for the next 12 years.
It was here that Wouter Basson would commit his most horrific acts.
State-Sponsored Genocide With Toxic Milk And Whiskey
Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesBasson at a hearing to determine his fitness to practice medicine on March 26, 2012.
Project Coast was established in 1981 by South Africa’s Ministry of Defense under the direction of then Prime Minister P.W. Botha.
Dr. Wouter Basson headed the operation and recruited some 200 professionals to participate, including high-ranking members of the South African Defense Force, scientists, and doctors. The project was initially presented as a defense-oriented research program meant to protect the country from enemies of the state.
What it really did was manufacture chemical and biological means of neutralizing anti-apartheid activists and preventing non-white populations from growing.
Among his deadly concoctions, Dr. Basson developed anthrax cigarettes, toxic milk, water, and whiskey, and poisoned tools and umbrellas. The idea was that these objects would be distributed in large quantities to the unwitting masses, who would thus be dispatched in secret.
Sometimes, however, Basson’s methods weren’t so secretive. In one operation that killed close to 200 Namibian prisoners of war, the victims were reportedly injected with incapacitating amounts of muscle relaxers and then dumped into the ocean from a helicopter.
But even when Basson’s toxic products weren’t being deployed, they were wreaking havoc in the testing phase alone. In fact, prisoners of war were often used as test subjects and left to die in remote areas.
In one particularly shocking case, Basson was involved in a plot to lace Nelson Mandela’s medication with thallium, “a toxic heavy metal that can permanently impair brain function,” before his release from prison in 1990.
When death wasn’t the objective, the project also focused on synthesizing “race-specific bacterial weapons” to sterilize South Africa’s non-white population.
Dr. Schalk Van Rensburg, the former director of Roodeplaat Research Laboratories, testified before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (a post-apartheid court-like body that allowed victims and witnesses to testify and perpetrators to undergo questioning or request amnesty for past crimes) that within two weeks of joining up with Project Coast:
“I realized this is not defensive work; this is offensive work. The most frequent instruction we obtained from Doctor Basson…was to develop something with which you could kill an individual which would make his death resemble a natural death, and that something was not to be detectable in a normal forensic laboratory.”
While testimony like this has shed some light on Wouter Basson’s crimes with Project Coast in the 1980s, much of his wrongdoing has surely remained under the veil of apartheid-era secrecy to this day.
Cooking Ecstasy To Pacify Entire Populations
Foto24/Gallo Images/Getty ImagesBasson sits in court during his hearing in 2012.
To grasp the full horror of Project Coast, one need look no further than the words of Wouter Basson himself: “I’m not going to say I did it because I was told to,” he told TimesLive in 2016.
“Some of it I wasn’t. I am not going to hide. It was my job, and whatever I did was not wrong. I am surprised and amazed at the hysteria surrounding my case.”
Indeed, once the project seemingly closed up shop, Basson remained unrepentant — and even channeled his efforts into other ventures.
When Project Coast wrapped up in 1991, Basson moved on to producing drugs like ecstasy (MDMA) and deploy them in ways that would “pacify” non-white populations.
These nonlethal “party” drugs were being synthesized by scientists at a research lab called Delta G, though it was likely just a front company for Project Coast.
Some of these low-level scientists were told they were making rocket fuel, others were told they were creating substances for “crowd control” — but, to be sure, they were involved in Basson’s plot to keep non-whites down with 98 percent pure MDMA.
Nevertheless, Basson maintained that he was only working on methods of “crowd control” during his eventual trials, which finally began under South Africa’s post-apartheid leadership in the 1990s.
“I Was A Soldier”: The Trials Of Wouter Basson
Wouter Basson is found guilty on four counts of unprofessional conduct by the Health Professions Council of South Africa in 2013.
In court, Basson defended his actions and portrayed himself as a foot soldier for the apartheid government. For example, during an interview published the day before his trial began, Bousson said: “My defense in court will be the truth. Whatever I did, I did because it was correct at the time.” He continued:
“What I did was for the good of the country, for things like crowd control. They said doctors shouldn’t get involved, but I was a soldier like any other doing my job. If you want to attack me or associate me with what happened in the army, then you must also look to more than 3,000 other doctors who did national service and willingly fired weapons at people.”
Dr. Basson’s trial began on Oct. 4, 1999, in Pretoria, South Africa. He was initially charged with 67 crimes that included 229 murders, conspiracy to commit murder, drug possession, drug trafficking, embezzlement, fraud, and theft, much of which stemmed from his work as the leader of Project Coast.
Judge Willie Hartzenberg dismissed conspiracy charges related to the deaths of 200 individuals in Namibia after ruling that South African courts lacked the jurisdiction to try Dr. Basson for crimes committed outside the country.
Additionally, the judge dismissed four murder charges in South Africa and 18 months later, he reduced the total number of charges to 46.
After a marathon trial of three years, three months, and 18 days, Judge Hartzenberg ruled that the state fell far short of the standard in proving their case “beyond a reasonable doubt.” He thus dismissed the remaining charges against Dr. Basson. Prosecutors appealed the judgment, but in 2003 South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal refused to grant a new trial.
How exactly Basson got away with all of it remains somewhat baffling to this day. He only called one witness — himself — and often admitted guilt while simply saying he was following others’ leads, but still, he walked free. Some say the judge was on his side, but the case’s outcome nevertheless remains a shocking victory for Basson to this day.
How Basson Escapes Justice Even Today
Wouter Basson delivers chilling testimony during his trial in 2014.
Though Basson evaded punishment for his Project Coast crimes, he has been periodically embroiled in legal trouble ever since. In 2006, the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) opened a new investigation into him and filed seven charges against him the following year for a smattering of crimes from his Project Coast days.
In January 2012, after a lengthy delay, the HPCSA dismissed two charges and part of a third charge, and a date for a hearing on the remaining four charges was scheduled for March of that year.
After those proceedings finally concluded on Dec. 18, 2013, it seemed as though justice had finally been served when Dr. Basson was found guilty of all four counts of unprofessional conduct.
But on March 27, 2019, Gauteng High Court Judge Sulet Potterill ruled that there was bias on the part of two of the committee members who presided over the HPCSA hearing and that both committee members must recuse themselves from any future disciplinary hearings. The result was that the HPCSA must initiate disciplinary hearings against Dr. Basson from scratch if they intend to continue their review of him.
With the courts on his side once again, it seems like Dr. Death may continue to escape justice again and again.
After this look at Dr. Wouter Basson, read about the Australian genocide against Aboriginals. Then, check out these 35 disturbing photos from the heydey of eugenics.
Gauteng in South Africa, where Omicron started, may be interpreted as the Telling Name (the way of affixing the criminal signature, to assure the credit): "Go (Gau) fly, the Chinese dragon Teng, bring us another pot of gold from Gauteng!"
The Russian Mob, allied with the Extreme (global?) Left (teeming with revenge for 1917?), with the New Abwehr as their brains and managers, appear to be the most likely actors.
The News And Times - newsandtimes.net
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Gauteng is the Telling Name:
"Go (Gau) fly, the Chinese dragon Teng, bring us pot of gold from Gauteng!"
The Russian Mob, allied with the Extreme Global Left (teeming with revenge for 1917?), with the New Abwehr as their brains & managers, appear to be the most likely actors.Gauteng - Wikipedia https://shar.es/aWzaVg
Etymology
The name Gauteng is derived from the Sotho-Tswana name, gauta meaning "gold".[7] There was a thriving gold industry in the province following the 1886 discovery of gold in Johannesburg.The Omicron strain has triggered a meteoric rise in cases in South Africa, mostly concentrated in Gauteng - Google Search https://shar.es/aWzaSX
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) — Police are searching for a man they say punched a woman in the face and tried to sexually assault her at a subway station in Lower Manhattan.
It happened around 9 p.m. Thursday at the Brooklyn Bridge/City Hall/Chambers Street station.
Police said the woman was walking down the stairs to enter the station when the man punched her and tried to take off her skirt.
A Good Samaritan jumped in, got the suspect off the victim and called 911.
The suspect then ran off.
Anyone with information about the attack is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477), or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). You can also submit a tip via their website or via DM on Twitter, @NYPDTips. All calls are kept confidential.
Last week in New York City, a state court judge dismissed the first-degree murder convictions of two men who each served more than 20 years in prison for the 1965 killing of Malcolm X. One of those wrongly convicted men wasn’t even alive to hear the government apologize. Cyrus R. Vance Jr., the current Manhattan district attorney, offered an apology on behalf of law enforcement which he stated, “failed the families of the two men.”
The exonerations of Muhammad A. Aziz, now 83, and Khalil Islam, who died at 74 in 2009, leave us with more questions than answers.
Now, 56 years after the murder of the fiery African American minister and former spokesman for the Black nationalist group, the Nation of Islam, the exonerations of Muhammad A. Aziz, now 83, and Khalil Islam, who died at 74 in 2009, leave us with more questions than answers, especially questions related to the conduct of law enforcement agencies. Previous suspects who were never arrested are dead. So we shouldn’t limit ourselves to asking, “Who did it?” The bigger question is “Why was the truth suppressed?”
A 22-month joint investigation by Vance’s office, lawyers for Aziz and Islam, the Innocence Project and civil rights attorney David A. Shanies, revealed that prosecutors, the New York City Police Department and the FBI withheld evidence that would likely have led to the two men’s acquittal. Their findings seemed to support what a third man convicted in the shooting death of Malcolm X has been saying all along. Mujahid Abdul Halim, an 80-year-old former member of the Nation of Islam, confessed in open court that he was one of the killers, but he also emphatically asserted that Aziz and Islam were not the other men involved.
While the recent investigation led to the formal exonerations, the credit for prompting the government’s action — or maybe publicly shaming officials into action — belongs to amateur historian, activist and investigative journalist Abdur-Rahman Muhammad whose Netflix docu-series “Who Killed Malcolm X?” exposed glaring gaps in the case.
Some of the investigative findings that led officials to conclude that Aziz and Islam were wrongfully convicted include:
- FBI documents implicating other Nation of Islam suspects and lessening suspicions about Islam and Aziz, then known, respectively, as Thomas 15X Johnson and Norman 3X Butler.
- State prosecutor’s notes revealing a failure to disclose the presence of undercover officers at the time of the shooting.
- NYPD files documenting that a New York Daily News reporter received a call the morning of the shooting from someone indicating Malcolm X would be murdered.
- An interview of a still-living witness who continued to confirm Aziz’s alibi: that he was home when the shooting happened.
We may never learn who the other killers were. But the bigger question may be why this case was, at best, horribly flawed – and at worst – deliberately deceiving. Deborah Francois, lawyer for Islam and Aziz, told The New York Times, “This wasn’t mere oversight. This was a product of extreme and gross official misconduct.”
While the recent inquiry found no evidence that the police or FBI conspired to kill Malcolm X, their conduct raises important questions: Did authorities have intelligence indicating Malcolm X, who’d left the Nation of Islam and excoriated its leader Elijah Muhammad for fathering eight children with six teenage girls, was being targeted for murder by the Nation of Islam but fail to act on it?
Wiretaps now require court authorization, and undercover operations must adhere to high-level oversight.
Malcolm X was perceived as a dangerous radical who, while he served as the most outspoken member of the Nation of Islam, had promoted the group’s theology of innate black superiority over whites and had, at least then, referred to Caucasians as “devils.” Is it possible that law enforcement, aware of the Nation of Islam’s growing animosity toward Malcolm X, found it convenient to ignore signs of the group’s plans to assassinate him, thereby allowing the elimination of a radical firebrand it viewed as a security threat?
Was the failure to disclose the presence of undercover officers at the site of the shooting merely a security safeguard to facilitate continued covert operations against the Nation of Islam, or, is it possible those undercover officers had learned of the plans to kill Malcolm X and did nothing to stop it from happening?
Did the original murder investigators deliberately ignore a strong suspect they had identified – a Nation of Islam “enforcer” named William Bradley – because Bradley, or other suspects, were police informants?
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Or was the original investigation lacking rigor because the mostly-white law enforcement organizations and the mostly-white media organizations of that day not care much about a crime within the Black community, especially one that claimed the life of a leader who had spoken so negatively about white people?
Maybe the most important question that remains is whether anything has changed to make this kind of law enforcement misconduct less likely. Even as we continue to question the credibility of our justice system, nearly 60 years after Malcolm X was assassinated, there are encouraging developments. Police departments suspected of unlawful investigations are subject to U.S. Department of Justice patterns and practices inquiries. At the FBI, the abuses of power by former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled his agency for 40 years and was in charge when Malcolm X was killed, led to strict regulations governing domestic operations. Wiretaps now require court authorization, and undercover operations must adhere to high-level oversight.
Layers of review within the FBI, the Justice Department and Congress don’t eliminate possible wrongdoing, but greatly reduce the chances. All FBI new agent and intelligence analyst classes study the dangers of authoritarian regimes and travel to the Holocaust Museum. Those same classes include in-depth study of the FBI’s abuses during its investigation of Martin Luther King, and those employees pay a visit to the MLK Memorial in Washington. The FBI has an official historian who chronicles the agency’s past abuses and shares them in presentations to classes at the FBI Academy.
The Manhattan DA’s office did the right thing in leading the inquiry that exonerated Aziz and Islam. It’s proof that the system, though flawed, is capable of correcting itself. Moving forward, we’ll need proof that measures are implemented to trigger regular review of police and prosecutor files in controversial convictions where contrary evidence exists. We shouldn’t have to rely on Netflix to force corrective court actions that come way too late to be construed as anything resembling justice.
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Frank Figliuzzi is an MSNBC columnist and a national security contributor for NBC News and MSNBC. He was the assistant director for counterintelligence at the FBI, where he served 25 years as a special agent and directed all espionage investigations across the government. He is the author of "The FBI Way: Inside the Bureau's Code of Excellence."
A Black man wrongly convicted of murdering Malcolm X is suing New York state for $20 million.
Muhammed Aziz, now 83, spent 20 years behind bars on a first-degree murder charge in Malcolm X’s death. He was convicted alongside two other men, Mujahid Halim and Khalil Islam, in 1966.
Aziz was released in 1985. Islam was released in 1987 and died in 2009.
“As a result of his wrongful conviction and imprisonment, Mr. Aziz spent 20 years in prison for a crime he did not commit and more than 55 years living with the hardship and indignity attendant to being unjustly branded as a convicted murderer of one of the most important civil rights leaders in history,” the lawsuit filed Tuesday reads.
Halim testified during the trial that he shot Malcom X and that neither of the two other men had anything to do with it. He was released in 2010.
Malcolm X was killed on Feb. 21, 1965, while addressing his Organization of Afro-American Unity at the Audubon Ballroom in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York’s Manhattan borough.
New York County Supreme Court administrative judge Ellen Biben granted a motion to vacate Aziz’s conviction in November. The judge also vacated Islam’s conviction.
“I regret that this court cannot fully undo the serious miscarriages of justice in this case and give you back the many years that were lost,” Biben said in the ruling.
The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office and the Innocence Project jointly re-investigated Malcolm X’s murder and uncovered FBI and NYPD documents that had been hidden from the prosecution and the defense.
The district attorneys office launched the investigation after a Netflix documentary “Who Killed Malcolm X?” raised questions about the murder.
“The FBI had eyewitness testimony from presumably the nine informants that were in the room that day about who did the crime,” the documentary’s producer Phil Bertelsen told CBS.
“Full descriptions of the men, and particularly the man who wielded the shotgun. That was information that was not given to the NYPD,” Bertelsen said.
No physical evidence has ever implicated Aziz or Islam in the murder. Each man also had an alibi that placed them away from the scene of the crime.
“The case against them rested solely on highly contradictory and implausible eyewitness testimony,” according to the Innocence Project.
“My wrongful conviction was a terrible injustice that resulted from the deliberate and dishonest actions of corrupt officials,” Aziz said after his sentence was vacated.
“It has caused unspeakable harm to my family and to me. The lost time and relationships with my family and loved ones can never be recovered.”
Malcolm X’s 56-year-old daughter Malikah Shabazz was found unconscious by her daughter in their Brooklyn home last month, days after the convictions against Islam and Aziz were vacated. Officials said her death appeared to be of natural causes.
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The first cases were linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, which is located across the Yangtze river where a virology lab is located Photograph:( Twitter )
Story highlights
Dr Alina Chan, a specialist in gene therapy and cell engineering at MIT and Harvard, made the claims when giving evidence to the UK Parliament's Science and Technology Select Committee.
There is a possibility that the COVID-19 virus was "most likely" leaked from a lab in China, British MPs were informed on Thursday.
Harvard scientist Dr Alina Chan, while testifying before the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, said that it was reasonable to hypothesise and investigate whether the Covid virus was modified in the lab.
The first cases were linked to a seafood market in Wuhan, which is located across the Yangtze river where a virology lab is located.
When asked by the panel about the probability of a lab leak as the origin of the pandemic, Chan said a “lab origin is more likely than natural origin at this point”.
“We all agree that there was a critical event at the Huanan Seafood Market, that was a superspreader event caused by humans. There is no evidence pointing to a natural animal origin of the virus at that market,” she noted.
Speaking on the possibility of the virus being engineered in the lab before a leak, Chan said: "We have heard from many top virologists that a genetically engineered origin of this virus is reasonable...and this includes virologists who themselves have made modifications to the first SARS virus."
On the question of her level of confidence that the world would eventually be able to establish the true origins of COVID-19, Chan said it was simply a matter of time.
"Right now it's not safe for people who know about the origin of this pandemic to come forward. It might be five years from now, it might be 50 years from now, but we live in an era where there's so much data being collected and stored...we just need a credible, systematic investigation," she said.
"We know now that this virus has a very unique feature, called the furin cleavage site that makes it the pandemic pathogen it is. So, without this feature, there's no way this would be causing this pandemic."
"Only recently in September did a proposal get leaked showing that scientists from the EcoHealth Alliance were in collaboration with the Wuhan Institute of Virology developing this pipeline for inserting novel furin cleavage sites, these genetic modifications, into SARS-like viruses in the lab," Chan said.
According to Tory lord Lord Ridley, who has co-authored a book on the virus's origins with Dr Chan, the fact that experts have still not located the animal host that would support a natural origin despite two years of investigation, supports the notion that COVID-19 emerged from a lab.Recent discoveries of China's attempted cover-up have compelled British and US intelligence agencies to investigate the lab-leak idea seriously, which was previously regarded as a lunatic conspiracy theory.
Watch | Gravitas: Lab leak "most likely" source of Covid-19, British MPs told
The explosive charges, on the other hand, are expected to put pressure on the UK government to question Beijing's assertions that the virus originated in nature.
They're also expected to raise more questions about Chinese President Xi Jinping's connection with the WHO, which was accused last year of issuing a whitewash report on the outbreak.
(With input from agencies)
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Was Sars-Cov-2 weaponized into Omicron by multiple back and forth humans – rodents passages? – Google Search https://shar.es/aWyO72
Was Sars-Cov-2 (further) weaponized into Omicron by multiple back and forth humans – rodents passages (in the lab or the special facilities)?
12.16.21 – Omicron Human – Rodents Transmissions – Selected Articles And Searches
- Omicron Variant: Study Says Mice Could Be Mutation Source – NBC New York
- covid omicron interspecies transfer theory – Google Search
- Study Says Mice Could Be a Source of Mutation – NBC New York | Daily NewYork Journal
- covid plague rodents – Google Search
- Was Sars-Cov-2 weaponized into omicron by multiple back and forth humans – rodents passages? – Google Search
- covid in rodents – Google Search
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- University of Washington and Italy’s National Institute of Molecular Genetics study of omicron – Google Search
- University of Washington and Italy’s National Institute of Molecular Genetics omicron – Google Search
- Krisitan G Andersen omicron – Google Search
- Ученые заявили, что «омикрон» перекинулся на переносчиков чумы | Здравоохранение | Общество | Аргументы и Факты
Omicron Variant Might Come From Transmission Between Humans and Mice, Study Says https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/coronavirus/omicron-variant-might-come-from-transmission-between-humans-and-mice-study-says/3451661/?_osource=db_npd_nbc_wnbc_twt_shr …
Omicron Variant Might Come From Transmission Between Humans and Mice, Study Says
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Russian court considers closing top rights group Memorial
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Moscow (AFP) – Russia's Supreme Court reconvened on Tuesday to hear a request to shut down Memorial, the country's most prominent rights group and a pillar of its civil society.
In court for alleged violations of its designation as a "foreign agent", Memorial is facing its biggest threat since it was founded by Soviet dissidents, including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Andrei Sakharov, in 1989.
Prosecutors have asked the Supreme Court to dissolve Memorial International, the group's central structure, for alleged failures to use the "foreign agent" label on all their publications, including social media posts, as required by law.
Dozens of supporters gathered in sub-zero temperatures in front of the Supreme Court in central Moscow and police vans were parked nearby.
A supporter holding a placard saying "Hands off Memorial" was detained, the group said.
"It is necessary to preserve Memorial so that we can understand where we lived, where our parents lived, and where we cannot return," said supporter Vladimir Ananich.
The 64-year-old doctor labelled the Russian authorities "grandchildren of Stalin" and accused them of trying to restore a climate of fear.
"They don't want people to think about what is happening in the country, because it is scary," he said.
A symbol of post-Soviet democratisation, Memorial has built a huge archive of Soviet-era crimes and has campaigned tirelessly for human rights in Russia.
On Tuesday, judge Alla Nazarova read numerous case materials as prosecutors argued that Memorial did not mark itself as a "foreign agent" properly.
Memorial's lawyers and founders have denied any serious violations, saying its material was properly marked and that only an insignificant number of documents may have been missing the tag.
Supporters of the group say its closure would signal the end of an era in Russia's post-Soviet democratisation process.
After the trial began on November 25, activists asked President Vladimir Putin to intervene.
But Putin told his human rights council that Memorial had been advocating on behalf of "terrorist and extremist organisations".
Memorial has been compiling a list of political prisoners that includes religious minorities banned in Russia and Putin's most prominent critic Alexei Navalny, whose political organisations were closed this year.
Oleg Orlov, a board member at Memorial, said on Tuesday he was still hoping authorities would reconsider.
"Hope springs eternal," he told AFP.
- 'Friend of the people' -
Russia's two surviving Nobel Peace Prize winners -- the last Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev and Novaya Gazeta newspaper editor Dmitry Muratov -- urged prosecutors to withdraw their claims.
In his Nobel speech in Oslo on Friday, Muratov pointed to "contradicting trends" in modern Russia. He noted that Putin supported building a monument to Memorial's first chairman Sakharov, while prosecutors are demanding the group be eliminated.
"Memorial is not an 'enemy of the people,'" Muratov said. "Memorial is a friend of the people."
The trial comes in a year that witnessed an unprecedented crackdown on Putin opponents, including the jailing of Navalny in February.
But the move to shutter Russia's top rights group stands out and would have been unimaginable a few years ago.
Authorities have brought another case against the group's Human Rights Centre, which is also accused of violating the "foreign agent" law and is facing another charge of defending "extremist and terrorist activities".
The second trial began November 23, and the next preliminary hearing is scheduled to take place on Thursday.
The organisation also campaigned for the rights of political prisoners, migrants and other marginalised groups and has highlighted abuses, particularly in Chechnya.
© 2021 AFP
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