Many Skeptical Of Accusations Against Malcom X’S Daughter

The indictment of Malcolm X’s daughter on charges of conspiring to kill Louis Farrakhan provoked widespread skepticism Friday, from the Nation of Islam, from blacks around the country and from former associates of the crucial government witness in the case.

Prosecutors have declined to identify the witness, apparently the person whom the 34-year-old defendant, Qubilah Bahiyah Shabazz, is charged with trying to hire as an assassin. But lawyers close to the defense identified him Friday as Michael Fitzpatrick, 34, a friend of Shabazz’s from their high school years in New York City.

This friend, the lawyers asserted, has a history of implicating his associates as an informer for the government and should not be believed.

At a news conference in Chicago Friday, Farrakhan’s chief of staff, Leonard F. Muhammad, said the Nation of Islam leader himself did not completely believe the government’s account, laid out in an indictment returned on Thursday by a federal grand jury in Minneapolis, Shabazz’s new hometown.

Muhammad suggested that larger forces were at work. “Regardless of her motive or what she’s doing or what she did,” he said, “she is the smallest part of any effort to destabilize or injure the Minister Louis Farrakhan. The smallest part.”

Farrakhan’s lawyer, Ava Muhammad, said Farrakhan had compassion for the family of Malcolm X, who was assassinated 30 years ago at a Harlem ballroom in front of Shabazz and three of her sisters. Shabazz’s mother, Dr. Betty Shabazz, has long believed that Farrakhan was behind her husband’s murder.

Muhammad said Friday that Farrakhan was “completely innocent” of the murder of his former mentor.

“It is natural for a daughter to love her father,” Muhammad said. “Shabazz, her family and the entire country have been subjected to a flood of false propaganda. In the face of this concerted effort to condemn him, it would be easy for conspirators to entrap this troubled young woman.”

The man whom government prosecutors say Shabazz hired to kill Farrakhan has lived much of his life in the federal witness protection program, according to lawyers close to the defense.

Court records show that Fitzpatrick - who is white, whose mother was Jewish and who, associates say, once belonged to the militant Jewish Defense League - was arrested in connection with a bombing at a Soviet bookstore in 1977, when he was 17. He then became a government informer.

He entered the witness protection program after the attempted bombing in 1978 of an Egyptian government tourist office in New York City by members of the Jewish Defense League. He was identified then as Michael Fitzpatrick and is now known as Michael Summers, of suburban Minneapolis.

Several former associates said Fitzpatrick was attracted to violence and danger.

“He is a set-up artist, who goes from group to group setting people up,” Steve Dennel, a former member of the JDL who attended high school at the U.N. International School in New York with Shabazz and Fitzpatrick, told The Associated Press.

Dennel said Fitzpatrick had once belonged to the Jewish Defense League and had been used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to infiltrate peace groups.

“He was always suggesting illegal things,” Dennel said. Of Shabazz, he said: “She was set up.”