Novelist Salman Rushdie promotes the German-language version of his ebook Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide in Berlin on Might 16, 2024. Within the ebook, Rushdie confronts the 2022 assault that left him blind in a single eye.
Sean Gallup/Getty Photos
cover caption
toggle caption
Sean Gallup/Getty Photos
Hadi Matar, the person who severely injured novelist Salman Rushdie in a 2022 stabbing assault, was sentenced Friday to 25 years in jail — the utmost for tried homicide.
Matar, 27, was discovered responsible of second-degree tried homicide in February for his assault on the creator on the nonprofit Chautauqua Establishment in New York state in August 2022. A knife-wielding Matar leapt onto the stage the place Rushdie was about to offer a lecture, stabbing the creator a number of instances within the face, neck, arm, stomach and eye.
The assault left Rushdie, now 77, partially blind and with everlasting nerve harm. The creator didn’t return to the Chautauqua County courtroom in Mayville, N.Y., for the sentencing, however did submit a sufferer impression assertion.
Decide David Foley additionally sentenced Matar to 7 years, to be served concurrently, for injuring the moderator who tried to cease the assault.
Hadi Matar (proper) and public defender Nathaniel Barone hearken to Chautauqua County Decide David Foley’s sentence in Chautauqua County courtroom in Mayville, N.Y., on Friday.
Adrian Kraus/AP
cover caption
toggle caption
Adrian Kraus/AP
Rushdie’s ebook The Satanic Verses, revealed in 1988, sparked indignant protests within the Muslim world over its controversial depiction of the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Months earlier than his demise in 1989, Iran’s Supreme Chief, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a spiritual fatwa calling for Rushdie’s homicide.
At trial, the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for the Western District of New York alleged Matar was performing on the fatwa. Matar, who lived in Fairview, N.J., on the time of the assault, has not cited the non secular decree as motivation, however has mentioned he disliked Rushdie, telling the New York Publish in a jailhouse interview that the creator had attacked Islam. In the identical interview, Matar admitted that he had learn solely about two pages of The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie himself testified on the February trial, telling the jury that the assailant struck him repeatedly. The novelist described being taken abruptly within the assault after which immediately changing into conscious of “a really massive amount of blood pouring out onto my garments.”
Matar’s protection staff argued that it wasn’t an open-and-shut case. “One thing very unhealthy did occur,” lawyer Lynn Schaffer acknowledged on the trial, including that the prosecution was required “to show way more than that.”
Matar additionally faces federal terrorism expenses
Matar faces a separate trial on federal expenses of terrorism in reference to the assault on Rushdie.
When the fees had been filed final July, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray mentioned Matar “tried to hold out a fatwa endorsed by [Hezbollah] that known as for the demise of Salman Rushdie — a fatwa issued in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.” If convicted on the federal expenses — which embody offering materials assist to terrorists and conspiracy to kill a U.S. citizen — Matar faces life in jail. A trial date hasn’t been set.
The award-winning Rushdie, who’s an Indian-born British-American citizen, has written quite a few books. Apart from The Satanic Verses, he’s additionally creator of Midnight’s Kids, set in postcolonial India, and Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide, a memoir concerning the assault that was revealed final yr.
