By CAROLYN THOMPSON, Related Press
MAYVILLE, N.Y. (AP) — A person who attacked Salman Rushdie with a knife in entrance of a surprised viewers in 2022, leaving the prizewinning writer blind in a single eye, was sentenced Friday to 25 years in jail.
Hadi Matar, 27, stood quietly because the decide pronounced the sentence. He didn’t deny attacking Rushdie, and when he was invited to handle the courtroom earlier than being sentenced, Matar received in a number of final insults on the author. He stated he believed in freedom of speech however known as Rushdie “a hypocrite.”
“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” stated 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.”
Rushdie, 77, didn’t return to western New York for the sentencing however submitted a sufferer influence assertion during which he stated he has nightmares about what occurred, Chautauqua County District Legal professional Jason Schmidt stated. The assertion was not made public.
Throughout the trial, the writer described 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 Establishment to talk about author security.
FILE – Writer Salman Rushdie seems at a press convention on the Ebook Truthful in Frankfurt, Germany on Oct. 20, 2023. (AP Photograph/Michael Probst, File)
Video of the assault, captured by the venue’s cameras and performed at trial, present Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching round him to stab at his torso with a knife. Because the viewers gasps and screams, Rushdie is seen elevating his arms and rising from his seat, strolling and stumbling for a number of steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing till they each fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.
A jury discovered Matar responsible of tried homicide and assault in February after deliberating for lower than two hours.
Decide David Foley instructed Matar that he thought it was notable he had chosen to try to kill Rushdie on the Chautauqua Establishment, a summer time retreat that prides itself on the free alternate of concepts.
“We all have the right to have our own ideals; we all have the right to carry them,” Foley stated. “But when you interfere with someone else’s ability to do that by committing a violent act, in the United States of America, that has to be an answerable crime.”
The decide additionally gave Matar a seven-year time period for wounding a person who was on stage with Rushdie, although that point will run concurrently to the opposite sentence.
After the assault, Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and greater than three weeks at a New York Metropolis rehabilitation heart. The writer of “Midnight’s Children,” “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “Victory City” detailed his restoration in his 2024 memoir, “Knife.”
Matar’s lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, had requested the decide for a sentence of round 12 years, citing his lack of a earlier prison document.
Schmidt, the prosecutor, stated Matar deserved the utmost sentence of 25 years, saying Matar “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.”
Matar subsequent faces a federal trial on terrorism-related prices. Whereas the primary trial targeted totally on the small print of the knife assault itself, the following one is anticipated to delve into the extra difficult problem of motive. He has pleaded not responsible. If convicted of the federal prices, Matar faces a most penalty of life in jail.
Authorities stated Matar, a U.S. citizen, was making an attempt to hold out a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s dying when he traveled from his residence in Fairview, New Jersey, to focus on Rushdie on the summer time retreat about 70 miles (110 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, in accordance with federal prosecutors.
Iranian chief Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa after publication of Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims think about blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding, however after Iran introduced it could not implement the decree he traveled freely over the previous quarter century.
Initially Printed: Might 16, 2025 at 11:13 AM EDT
