Nation of Islam Accuses Government of Conspiracy : Plot: Farrakhan’s group questions informant’s past links with FBI. It says Malcolm X’s daughter was set up.

Nation of Islam officials Friday charged that the murder-for-hire indictments against the daughter of Malcolm X are part of a government conspiracy to divide the black community, and pointed to the key informant’s past as reason to question the validity of the case.

“The government must be forced to release to the public all it knows,” said Nation attorney Ava Muhammad at a press conference here.

The daughter, Qubilah Shabazz, faces federal charges of hiring a hit man to kill Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. Muhammad said the Nation accepts the suggestions by Shabazz’s attorneys that she was lured into the alleged plot against Farrakhan.

The purported hit man is an informant who has worked for federal authorities in the past, including aiding in the arrest of Jewish militant terrorists in New York 16 years ago, according to lawyers for Shabazz.

The U.S. attorney’s office here refused comment on the attorneys’ characterization of the informant and on the Nation’s allegations. “The evidence will come out at the trial,” said spokeswoman Karen A. Jambor.

The presumptive hit man, identified as Michael Fitzpatrick, went to school with Shabazz, 34, in New York and is enrolled in the federal witness protection program, said Scott Tilsen, Shabazz’s court-appointed public defender.

Tilsen said the informant is a white man in his 30s who was paid by the government during the seven-month investigation of the alleged plot against Farrakhan. He apparently was using the name Michael Summers and lived in St. Paul.

His participation in the protection program, the attorneys said, resulted from his role in the 1978 arrests of two men on charges of planning to bomb the Egyptian government tourist office on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

A man identified as Michael Fitzpatrick tipped off authorities to the plan and was with Barry B. Berger and Victor G. Vancier when police stopped their car and took them into custody, court records show. Vancier later would serve as national chairman of the militant Jewish Defense League.

Fitzpatrick, who emerged from the vehicle carrying two sticks of dynamite wired to a triggering device, was not arrested.

According to transcripts of a monitored conversation near the Port Authority Terminal, Fitzpatrick told Berger and Vancier that he was 18 years old and was on federal probation for what he referred to as “Four Continents.” The Four Continents Russian bookstore in New York was bombed during a rally for Soviet Jewry in 1976.

Steve Dennel, a former JDL member, said Fitzpatrick “is a set-up artist, who goes from group to group setting people up,” according to the Associated Press. Dennel also told the AP that the FBI used Fitzpatrick to investigate peace groups.

“He was always suggesting illegal things,” said Dennel, who also attended United Nations High School with both Fitzpatrick and Shabazz. Of Shabazz, he said: “She was set up.”

The mysteries surrounding Thursday’s indictment echo and reopen the decades-old puzzle of the 1965 slaying of Malcolm X--a bloody assassination witnessed by Shabazz when she was 4.

Though three men were convicted of pumping 21 bullets into the legendary Black Muslim leader, who had split bitterly with the Nation of Islam, rumors have swirled for decades over who or what truly was behind the killing.

The names of Elijah Muhammad, who was then the Nation’s leader, and Farrakhan, who was minister of the Boston mosque--have surfaced often, along with the FBI and the CIA, in the rumor mill.

During a television interview last spring, the widow of Malcolm X and mother of his six daughters, including the defendant, accused Farrakhan of playing a part in her husband’s murder. Nation officials at the time responded that she was being manipulated.

Muhammad repeated on Friday Farrakhan’s previous statements that he is “completely innocent of any involvement in the murder of Malcolm X.”

“In the face of this concerted effort to condemn (Farrakhan) it would be easy for conspirators to entrap this troubled young woman,” said Nation of Islam attorney Muhammad.

“The question that must be raised by the black community today is whether or not in the light of our 440 years of suffering at the hands of our oppressors, we can reasonably believe that the United States Department of Justice desires to protect the life of Minister Louis Farrakhan,” Muhammad said.

Shabazz, who has been released until her arraignment next week on the condition that she stay in Minnesota, is now in seclusion, hiding from the crush of publicity and out of concern for her own physical safety, said Larry Leventhal, who has spoken with her and is monitoring the case for her family.

“She’s reflective on everything,” Leventhal said. “This is part of a 30-year experience with her that started with her father’s death. . . . She’s been searching for answers for 30 years.”

Shabazz was raised with her sisters by her mother, Betty, in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. Betty Shabazz gave birth to twins after her husband’s death. She bought the house in the suburbs with royalties from Malcolm X’s best-selling autobiography, then went on to earn a doctorate and to become director of communications at Medgar Evers College.

“They are a marvelous, very outstanding family,” said Mildred Shannon, wife of a New Rochelle minister. “I was certainly very surprised when this happened. It doesn’t sound like the young lady.”

Qubilah Shabazz attended Princeton University for two semesters. In the early 1980s, she lived in Paris. “People had a hard time pronouncing her name so they called her Quibby (KIB-bee),” said an American woman who befriended her there.

They had known each other a year before the woman found out that Malcolm X was Shabazz’s father. She confronted Shabazz, who responded by asking her friend to keep that information secret.

“She wasn’t angry,” the woman recalled Friday, “but she wanted me to keep my mouth shut.”

The woman said Shabazz telephoned her last fall to say that she was “engaged to someone she knew from childhood and they were going to move to Minnesota.” Shabazz moved to Minneapolis in September.

Shabazz also was reticent about her past in Minneapolis, her neighbors there said. She lived in a rear apartment in a brick 1920s apartment complex with her son, Malcolm. Neighbors said she seemed knowledgeable about black history.

Kenneth Doss, a cook who lives in her building, said Shabazz told him she had been away from her apartment recently because her son was sick and expressed irritation that someone had entere1679845477 When neighbors made noise in the hall, added another neighbor, David Tomlinson, “she’d pop her head out. I guess she was pretty suspicious.”

If convicted, Shabazz faces up to 90 years in prison and $2.25 million in fines.

Pasternak reported from Chicago and Braun from Minneapolis. Times researcher John Beckham in Chicago, staff writers John Goldman in New York and Carla Hall in Los Angeles, and special correspondent Helaine Olen in New York also contributed to this story.