Biography
Yusuf A. Mussadiq was one of the four young Sunni Muslim men known as the Williamsburg Four. On January 18, 1973 he, with Shuaib Abdur Raheem, Dawud Abdur Rahman, and Salih Ali Abdullah, entered John and Als Sporting Goods at Broadway and Melrose Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn intending to acquire weapons to defend Sunni Muslim communities in New York after that days murders of seven Sunni Muslims by members of the Nation of Islam in Washington, D.C. (the Hanafi Massacre). The forty-eight-hour police siege that followed killed NYPD Officer Stephen Gilroy in police gunfire that the defense argued and inside-store witnesses later confirmed had not come from the defendants.
The four were convicted in June 1974 of Officer Gilroys murder and sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Mussadiq served twenty-five years before suffering a massive stroke that left him partially incapacitated. He was released on medical parole in 1998 and died on January 1, 2003.
