OAKLAND — Police investigating the execution-style killing of a journalist raided a bakery run by a Black Muslim splinter group Friday and seized weapons they said linked the group to the crime.
Just before dawn, scores of officers in riot gear descended from heavily armed vehicles and stormed Your Black Muslim Bakery and three nearby residences. Seven people were arrested and numerous weapons were seized in the military-style operation.
The brazen slaying Thursday of Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey has shocked Bay Area residents as well as journalists nationwide.
At a news conference Friday, police sketched a few details of the operation that they say captured Bailey's killers.
"We have scientific evidence that links the firearms to the murder of Chauncey Bailey" as well as two other recent killings, Deputy Chief Howard Jordan said the day after Bailey was shot in broad daylight while walking to work.
The masked gunman fled in a van, said a police spokesman, who described the attack as the work of a contract killer.
A lawyer for the Post, a black-owned weekly, said Friday that Bailey was working on a piece examining financial allegations against the bakery, which has filed for bankruptcy. Bailey was also working on a separate story on youth violence, but the attorney said he did not believe that the group was a focus of that story.
"He was working on several stories, including one about financial allegations against the group," attorney Walter Riley said. "None of them were at the publication stage. They were still looking for confirmation."
Riley said he believed that Bailey was targeted because of his work as a journalist. "There is no indication there was a personal motive in this," he said.
Post Publisher Paul Cobb was more circumspect about whether Bailey was killed in retaliation for his digging.
"I don't know if there's a connection," he said. "I think that in terms of sequence of events, both are happening within a 48-hour period. But that bridge in Minneapolis fell too. Is that connected as well? I don't want to link things until I am sure."
Your Black Muslim Bakery is an Oakland institution founded in the 1960s by a charismatic entrepreneur and spiritual leader named Yusuf Ali Bey Sr., who died in 2003. The group he established is unrelated to the Nation of Islam.
