Biography
Salih Ali Abdullah is one of the four young Sunni Muslim men who became known as the Williamsburg Four after a January 18, 1973 attempt to take guns and ammunition from John and Als Sporting Goods at Broadway and Melrose Street in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. The four — Shuaib Abdur Raheem, Dawud Abdur Rahman, Yusuf A. Mussadiq, and Salih Ali Abdullah — entered the store with the intention of acquiring weapons to defend Sunni Muslim communities in New York after the same days murders of seven Sunni Muslims in Washington, D.C. by members of the Nation of Islam in what became known as the Hanafi Massacre.
A store patron alerted police, and the New York Police Department arrived in massive force. The four men attempted to surrender almost immediately, but were fired on as they came out the back door and forced back inside. The siege lasted nearly forty-eight hours. During the police barrage one NYPD officer, Stephen Gilroy, was killed and two others were wounded — by police gunfire, the defense argued and witnesses inside the store later corroborated. The four eventually negotiated a peaceful surrender. They were convicted in June 1974 of the murder of Officer Gilroy and sentenced to twenty-five years to life.
Fifty-plus years later, Salih Ali Abdullah is still incarcerated at the Auburn Correctional Facility in upstate New York under New York Department of Corrections inmate number 74-A-2614 — making him one of the longest-held political prisoners in the United States. The Jericho Movement lists him among its ancestor / current political prisoners. (Co-defendant Yusuf A. Mussadiq was released on medical parole in 1998 after a stroke and died in 2003. Shuaib Abdur Raheem was released on parole in July 2010 after 35 years. Dawud Abdur Rahman was released on parole in 2017.)
He died in custody in 2020, suffering a fatal stroke in the middle of his fourteenth Parole Board appearance, after serving about forty-seven years.
