Hadi Matar (27) who stabbed and partially blinded novelist, Sir Salman Rushdie during a lecture in New York was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday 16th May, convicted in February this year of attempted murder and assault. The incident occurred in August 2022, when Rushdie was on stage speaking before an audience.
The writer was stabbed multiple times in the face and neck, in an attack that left him blind in one eye, with damage to his liver and a paralysed hand caused by nerve damage to his arm. Matar received the maximum 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of Sir Salman Rushdie. He was also found guilty for wounding Henry Reese, who was interviewing Rushdie at the time of the attack; for that he was sentenced to seven years plus three years post-release.
The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt explained. Sir Salman was not in the court for his assailant’s sentencing on Friday.
The attack on Rushdie came 35 after the publication of his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, which made him the target for death threats due to its portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. In Islam, visual depictions of all the prophets are prohibited.
Rushdie was forced into hiding for nine years after Iran’s religious leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa (decree) calling for the author’s death in response to the book. In recent years, however, the author said he believed the threats against him had diminished, telling a German magazine, not long before the attack that he felt “relatively normal”.
Prosecutors in this case argued that the attack was targeted. “There were a lot of people around that day but there was only one person who was targeted,” prosecuting lawyer Jason Schmidt told the jury.
During the two-week trial, Sir Salman Rushdie testified that he saw a man rushing towards him while on stage at the historic arts institute in Chautauqua, New York, and detailed the moment he felt certain he was going to die.
Rushdie, a British-Indian novelist, later detailed his terrifying experience and his long road to recovery in a memoir entitled Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
