By Rich McKay

(Reuters) – The family of Malcolm X, a civil rights leader who was assassinated nearly 60 years ago, filed a $100 million federal lawsuit on Friday accusing the FBI, the CIA and the U.S. Police Department of New York that they allowed his assassination to be carried out.

The lawsuit, filed by Malcolm X’s daughter Ilyasah Shabazz and other family members, alleges that law enforcement agencies withheld evidence that they knew about the plot to kill him but did nothing to stop it.

“We believe they all conspired to assassinate Malcolm X, one of the greatest thought leaders of the 20th century,” Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney representing the family, told a news conference.

The wrongful-death lawsuit was announced at a memorial center at the site in New York where Malcolm X was killed. It seeks to answer questions about the assassination and describe an accurate history of events, Crump said. It is also intended to bring compensation to the family.

A spokesman for the New York Police Department was not immediately available for comment, but the department previously told Reuters it would not comment on the litigation when it was announced last year.

The FBI and CIA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Malcolm X rose to prominence as the national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, an African-American Muslim group that advocated black separatism.

After more than a decade with the group, he publicly broke with it in 1964. He moderated some of his earlier views on racial separation, angering some members of the Nation of Islam and prompting death threats.

Talmadge Hayer, then a member of the Nation of Islam, testified in court that he was one of the three killers. But speculation that the government knew about the assassination plot and allowed it to happen has persisted for decades.

Shabazz was just two years old on February 21, 1965, when her father was murdered as he prepared to speak at the Audubon Ballroom in New York. She was present with her mother and siblings when the assassination took place.

(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta; Editing by Rod Nickel)