Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie, gets imprisonment of 25 years

Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie in 2022 and blindly blind him, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday. An American court decided that. Three months ago Matar was already found guilty of attempted murder of Rushdie.

The British author (now 77 years old) was stabbed in 2022 during an event in the US state of New York when he was about to give a lecture. Matar later gave no motive for his act, but it did stated that he found Rushdie not « good person, » because the writer « attacked Islam. »

Before the judgment, the 27-year-old Matar stood up and made a statement about freedom of expression in which he called Rushdie a hypocritical. The 25 years of punishment he received is the maximum punishment for attempted murder in the US. Matar also received seven years before the man’s injury was also on stage during the attack on Rushdie.

According to the public prosecutor, who argued for the maximum punishment, Matar had « thought he could cause the most damage, not only to Mr. Rushdie but to this community, to the 1,400 people who were there and saw it. »

Rushdie, who himself became a crown witness in the process, described rather in detail how he thought he would die after Matar had injured him with fifteen knife stitches. « I became aware of the large amount of blood in which I lay, » he said from the witness bank in February. « My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain and hand and it became clear to me that I was dying. » Rushdie himself was not present in the courtroom Friday.

Terrorism

Matar is also on trial for terrorism -related charges at the federal level. According to American authorities, Matar, who is an American citizen, tried to perform a decades of old ‘Fatwa’ (a decree announced by an Islamic religious leader).

This is a Fatwa from 1989, issued by the former Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini: a death sentence for Rushdie after the publication of his book The Devil’s Verses. According to Khomeini, Rushdie’s book was « blasphemous. » Iran finally announced that the ‘Fatwa’ did not implement it, so that Rushdie could travel again in the past twenty -five years, after a period of in -depth threats.

According to a federal indictment, Matar’s motive for the attack on Rushdie’s life would come from a speech from 2006 by Hassan Nasrallah, the then leader of Hezbollah. In that speech, the Hezbollah leader expressed support for the old Fatwa. Hezbollah is labeled by the US as a terrorist organization.

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