Rushdie attacker gets 25-year prison term
The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, was on Friday sentenced to 25 years in prison.
A jury found Hadi Matar (27) guilty of attempted murder and assault in February. Rushdie did not return to court to the western New York courtroom for his assailant’s sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement.
During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the key witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about writer safety.
Before being sentenced, Matar stood and made a statement about freedom of speech in which he called Rushdie a hypocrite.
“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothing and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully. He wants to bully other people. I don't agree with that.” Matar received the maximum 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of Rushdie and seven years for wounding a man who was on stage with him. The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said.
In requesting the maximum sentence, Schmidt told the judge that Matar “chose this. He designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it”. Public defender Nathaniel Barone pointed out that Matar had an otherwise clean criminal record and disputed that the people in the audience should be considered victims, suggesting that a sentence of 12 years would be appropriate.
Authorities said Matar, a US citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death when he travelled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 112.6 km 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 Rushdi’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 travelled 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.
