A witness to the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X has come forward to claim that a comment he overheard as police were restraining assassin Thomas Hagan outside the Audubon Ball room proved to him that the New York police department and FBI knew beforehand that there would be an attempt on the civil rights activist’s life.
Mustafa Hassan said he heard an officer ask of Hagan, “Is he one of us?”
“From my vantage point this was an attempt by police to assist in him getting away,” Hassan said on Tuesday in a statement to reporters, read mere feet away from where Malcolm X was gunned down in New York City’s Audubon Ballroom.
Appearing alongside the civil rights attorney Ben Crump, Hassan asserted that he prevented Hagan from being taken away by reaching out and grabbing the assassin by the collar.
Hassan, formerly known as Richard Melwin Jones, delivered a vivid description of his recollection of the day that the leader of the Organization of Afro-American Unity was assassinated.
According to Hassan, the assassination unfolded when someone shouted a racist slur along with the words “get your hands out of my pocket!”
A bomb went off as Malcolm X asked everyone to calm down, and then gunshots erupted. During the ensuing chaos, Hassan spotted a man with a gun in his hand running toward him.
Hassan said he managed to knock down Hagan, better known as Talmadge X Hayer, a member of the Nation of Islam.
After checking on Malcolm, Hassan said he went outside the ballroom to find the activist’s followers beating Hagan. That’s when he heard one of multiple police officers trying to pull Hagan away ask, “Is he one of us?”
Hassan, reading from his statement, also claimed that a police special service bureau member and undercover informant Eugene Roberts had described seeing “a dry run” on Malcolm’s life a week earlier.
Crump and his associate Ray Hamlin said the “is he one of us” comment may now give Malcolm X’s family a basis to bring a legal claim seeking damages from the New York police department as well as the federal government.
Such a claim would accuse both entities of “fraudulent concealment” and “material misrepresentation of facts” because, the attorneys argue, it indicates that police authorities had informants in the building and, by extension, knew there would be an attempt on Malcolm’s life.
“We’re focused on the FBI, the federal government and the New York City police department,” Hamlin told the Guardian. He also said that the phrase Hassan heard “gives us indication that members of law enforcement were aware that there were people working with them in order to achieve the death of Malcolm X”.
Crump added: “It tells us they knew something was going down. Even though they didn’t know who was doing it, they all knew and they came because it was the assassination of Malcolm X. They were saying is this guy with us because they knew they had planted Black people in there who were informants.”
Crump also accused authorities of intentionally “trying to keep information away fraudulently from people seeking justice, that being Malcolm X’s family”.
“They sent a directive that no one is to tell about our presence in the Audubon Ballroom and then sat by as two innocent people were wrongfully convicted,” Crump said.
Crump’s remarks referred to New York City’s agreement in October to pay $26m to settle lawsuits filed on behalf of two men whose convictions in the assassination were thrown out after a judge found “serious miscarriages of justice” had taken place.
The two men, Muhammad Aziz and Khalil Islam, each spent more than 20 years in prison after their hasty arrests and a trial that relied on evidence since deemed questionable.
A two-year investigation led by the Manhattan district attorney’s office found that prosecutors, the FBI and the police had withheld key evidence that probably would have led to acquittals if presented to a jury.
Tuesday’s briefing with reporters was at the Malcolm X & Dr Betty Shabazz Memorial and Educational Center, which is on the site of the Audubon in Washington Heights. Attendees included Malcolm X’s daughters Qubilah and Ilyasah Shabazz, who were in the ballroom that night with their mother, Betty Shabazz, when their father was shot 21 times as he sought to gain support for the newly formed Organization of Afro-American Unity, after he broke from the Nation of Islam.
Ilyasah said she and her family still had many unanswered questions.
“I think the truth should be told,” Ilyasah said.
Qubilah Shabazz declined comment. She was arrested in 1995 in connection with an alleged plot to kill Louis Farrakhan, then the leader of the Nation of Islam, who has faced but denied accusations of having a hand in Malcolm X’s assassination.
Hassan said he was not the only one to believe authorities were involved in Malcolm X’s assassination. “I realized that almost immediately,” he told the Guardian.
