Khaalis had written and sent fifty letters[5] calling Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad "guilty of 'fooling and deceiving people – robbing them of their money, and besides that dooming them to Hell.'"
The letters were mailed to ministers of all fifty mosques of the Nation of Islam, a sect that Khaalis had infiltrated and in which he had been a leader in the 1950s.
[5] The massacre was a direct cause of the 1973 Brooklyn hostage crisis that started the following day, as the four perpetrators, themselves Sunni Muslims, sought to acquire firearms for self-defense in the event they were targeted for a similar attack.
[11] Hamaas Abdul Khaalis was originally a Roman Catholic[12] and Seventh-day Adventist[13] born in Gary, Indiana[12] as Ernest Timothy McGhee.
In 1957 he was demoted or lost influence in a dispute[12] possibly after unsuccessfully trying to convince Muhammad to change the direction of the movement.
[14] He then moved to New York City where he ran the Hanafi Madh-hab center in Harlem under his Sunni Muslim name Hamaas Abdul Khaalis.
In 1971 Jabbar donated a $78,000 field stone mansion for Khaalis' headquarters in Washington, D.C.[2] Police believed the continued efforts to convert people in New York to be a reason for the growing conflict between Sunni Muslims and Black Muslims, and may have contributed to the murders.
"[12] On January 12, 1973, several Black Mafia affiliates traveled to Washington, D.C and scouted the home.
Then on January 17, 1973, Ronald Harvey, John Clark, James "Bubbles" Price, John Griffin, Theodore Moody, William Christian, and Jerome Sinclair traveled in two vehicles from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C.[2] One of the men called claiming to be interested in purchasing literature about the Hanafi and arranged to come to the residence to purchase the literature.
[16] Of the six defendants, one was acquitted when a key witness, Price, an unindicted co-conspirator, refused to testify.
Price also thought that if he could get out from the witness protection program he could reintegrate with his black Muslim brothers and they would stop threatening violence against him.
[4] Another defendant, John Griffin, was granted a retrial after the jury had found him guilty, which ended in a mistrial because Amina Khaalis, a survivor of the massacre and the daughter of the Hanafi leader, refused to be cross-examined as she had "suffered irreparable psychological trauma" and it was thought that it was "highly probable" that she would suffer psychiatric injury if she were to testify again about the murders.
He said that the purpose of the siege was to bring attention to the murders of his wife, two children, and nine-day-old grandchild, and the shooting of his daughter.