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Man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie on stage sentenced to 25 years in prison

Kaumi GazetteWORLD NEWS16 May, 20258.2K Views

The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, was sentenced Friday to serve 25 years in prison.
| Photo Credit: AP

The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, was sentenced Friday to serve 25 years in prison.

A jury discovered Hadi Matar, 27, responsible of tried homicide and assault in February.

Mr. Rushdie didn’t return to court docket to the western New York courtroom for his assailant’s sentencing however submitted a sufferer affect assertion. During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the important thing witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and physique greater than a dozen instances as he was being launched on the Chautauqua Institution to discuss author security.

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Before being sentenced, Matar stood and made a press release about freedom of speech in which he referred to as Mr. Rushdie a hypocrite.

“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” mentioned Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothes and sporting handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”

Matar obtained the utmost 25-year sentence for the tried homicide of Rushdie and 7 years for wounding a person who was on stage with him. The sentences should run concurrently as a result of each victims have been injured in the identical occasion, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt mentioned.

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In requesting the utmost sentence, Schmidt advised the decide that Matar “chose this. He designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr. Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it.”

Public defender Nathaniel Barone identified that Matar had a in any other case clear felony document and disputed that the individuals in the viewers needs to be thought of victims, suggesting {that a} sentence of 12 years can be acceptable.

“Every day since then, for the last couple of years, this case has been an international publicity sponge,” Barone mentioned. “There was no presumption, ever, of innocence for Mr. Matar from the very beginning.”

Mr. Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and greater than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation middle. The author of “Midnight’s Children,” “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “Victory City” detailed his recovery in his 2024 memoir, “Knife.”

Matar next faces a federal trial on terrorism-related charges. While the first trial focused mostly on the details of the knife attack itself, the next one is expected to delve into the more complicated issue of motive.

Authorities said Matar, a U.S. citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 70 miles (112.6 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.

Matar believed the fatwa, first issued in 1989, was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, according to federal prosecutors.

Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa after publication of Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding, but after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree he traveled freely over the past quarter century.

Matar pleaded not guilty to a three-count indictment charging him with providing material to terrorists, attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah and engaging in terrorism transcending national boundaries.

Video of the assault, captured by the venue’s cameras and played at trial, show Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife. As the audience gasps and screams, Rushdie is seen raising his arms and rising from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.

Jurors in Matar’s first trial delivered their verdict after less than two hours of deliberation.