Killer of Malcolm X’s Grandson Sentenced To 27 Years

Manuel Alejandro Perez de Jesus, 26, has been sentenced to 27 years and 6 months in prison for the murder of Malcolm Latif Shabazz, grandson of Malcolm X, according to reports from the Amsterdam News and the Final Call.

According to the Final Call, Dr. Wilner Metelus, president of the Committee on Citizens of the Defense of the Naturalized and AfroMexicans (CCDNAM), posted the update on his page back on February 12. Political activist and former United States representative, Cynthia McKinney, confirmed the news on her page on February 13.

It is not clear whether or not David Hernández Cruz, the other suspect who was arrested in Shabazz’s death, has gone to trial or been sentenced.

As previously reported by NewsOne, Shabazz died from vicious injuries sustained on May 9, 2013 in Mexico City, Mexico, during a brawl at the Palace bar near Plaza Garibaldi, reportedly a dangerous area for tourists.

Miguel Suarez,  a labor movement leader and acquaintance of Shabazz’s who allegedly invited him there to help organize with Afro-Mexicans being discriminated against, was with Shabazz at the bar. After the two men were allegedly separated at gunpoint over a bill discrepancy, Suarez was somehow able to escape. When he returned, he found Shabazz outside the bar and took him to a hospital where he died.

An autopsy found that Shabazz died of blows to the head, face and torso.

“Malcolm was killed in Mexico,” said his aunt Ilyasah Shabazz to Democracy Now. “He was—and this speaks to his integrity. He was invited to Mexico under the premise that the African Mexicans were being discriminated and treated unfairly and that they needed him to, you know, talk to them. And so, he went thinking that he was going to speak to these people, and they ended up killing him.”

Questions have continued to swirl around Shabazz’s death. Suarez has not been forthcoming with any more details and with Shabazz being murdered so far away, the story has failed to maintain the traction that it had when the news was first reported.

Adding fuel to the fire, after being arrested by the FBI while en route to Iran to attend a Hollywoodism conference, Shabazz released a lengthy statement detailing how government agencies carry out “public assassinations”:

In the beginning of 2012 I had been informed that I was under investigation by the F.B.I.’s Counter Terrorism Task Force Unit located in Goshen, N.Y.

…

The formula for a public assassination is: the character assassination before the physical assassination; so one has to be made killable before the eyes of the public in order for their eventual murder to then deemed justifiable. And when the time arrives for these hits to be carried out you’re not going to see a C.I.A. agent with a suit & tie, and a badge that says “C.I.A.” walk up to someone, and pull the trigger. What they will do is to out-source to local police departments in the region of their target, and to employ those that look like the target of interest to infiltrate the workings in order to set up the environment for the eventual assassination (character, physical/incarceration, exile) to take place.

Months after he released that statement, and just days after he posted about “powerful enemies” on Facebook, he would be dead.