Thomas Hagan

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Thomas Hagan is a former member of the Nation of Islam, who was one of the assassins that killed Malcolm X in 1965. For a while he also went by the name of Talmadge Hayer and his chosen Islamic name is Mujahid Abdul Halim

When Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, in the Audubon Ballroom in Washington Heights, the police arrested Hagan at the scene of the crime. He later confessed the crime but claimed that Thomas Johnson (Khalil Islam) and Norman Butler (Muhammad Abd Al-Aziz), two suspects who were arrested at a later point in time, were not involved in the assassination. Hagan stated in 1977 in an affidavit, that he had planned the assassination with four others (Johnson and Butler not being among them) to seek revenge for Malcolm X's public criticism of Elijah Muhammad. With regard to the assassination itself, he said that one of his accomplices distracted Malcom X's bodyguards by starting an argument about having been pickpocketed. When the bodyguards moved toward the diversion and away from Malcom X, a man with a shotgun stepped up to X and shot him in the chest. After that, Hagan himself and another of his accomplices shot several rounds at Malcolm X with handguns.