Novelist Salman Rushdie assailant sentenced to 25 years in prison
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Author Salman Rushdie attending a photocall ahead of the presentation of Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder in Berlin on May 16.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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MAYVILLE, New York - An American-Lebanese man was sentenced to 25 years in prison on May 16 for trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack at a New York cultural centre.
Hadi Matar, 27, was convicted in February of attempted murder
Matar received the maximum sentence of 25 years for the attack on Rushdie and seven years for assault on another attendee at the speaking event. The sentences are to run concurrently.
Rushdie, a British-American, told jurors about Matar “stabbing and slashing” him at the upscale cultural centre. “It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie said, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood”.
Matar – who shouted pro-Palestinian slogans on several occasions during the trial – stabbed Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade.
He previously told media he had read only two pages of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, but believed the author had “attacked Islam”.
Matar’s lawyers had sought to prevent witnesses from characterising Rushdie as a victim of persecution following the 1989 fatwa by Iran’s then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini, which called for his murder over supposed blasphemy in the novel.
Iran has denied any link to the attacker and said only Rushdie was to blame for the incident.
The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye was severed in the attack.
His Adam’s apple was lacerated, his liver and small bowel penetrated, and he became paralysed in one hand after suffering severe nerve damage to his arm.
Rushdie was rescued from Matar by bystanders. In 2024, he published a memoir
Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai but moved to England as a boy, was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel Midnight’s Children (1981), which won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.
Hadi Matar, the man accused in the attempted murder of British author Salman Rushdie, appears in court.
PHOTO: AFP
But The Satanic Verses brought him far greater, mostly unwelcome, attention.
Rushdie became the centre of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable under any circumstance.
Books and bookshops were torched, his Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher was shot several times.
Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for a decade after the 1989 fatwa, but for the past 20 years – until the attack – he lived relatively normally in New York. AFP
