Salman Rushdie assailant sentenced to 25 years in prison

New Straits Times

18-05-2025

MAYVILE, United States: An American-Lebanese man was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday 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 and assault for the stabbing, which left Rushdie blind in one eye.
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 during the trial 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 the media he had only read 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 Iran's 1989 fatwa calling 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. Last year, he published a memoir called "Knife" in which he recounted his near-death experience.
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.
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 circumstances.
Books and bookshops were torched, his Japanese translator was murdered, and his Norwegian publisher was shot several times.