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The man found guilty of attempted murder of Salman Rushdie has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.
On Friday, the Chautauqua county court issued the sentence to Hadi Matar, 27, of New Jersey, nearly three months after he was first convicted of attempted murder in the second degree.
Matar’s conviction followed an intense trial during which Rushdie, 77, detailed the moment when he felt certain that he was going to die from Matar’s attack during a literary gathering in western New York state in 2022. The author was severely wounded and lost the use of his right eye.
In a statement delivered to court before his sentencing, Matar said: “Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people… He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”
Matar was also sentenced to seven years for wounding Ralph Henry Reese, a moderator at Rushdie’s lecture who was on stage with him. According to the Chautauqua county district attorney, Jason Schmidt, Matar’s two sentences will run concurrently as both victims were injured at the same event.
“He 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,” Schmidt said, adding that Matar effectively “chose this” maximum sentencing.
Meanwhile, public defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar had an otherwise clean criminal record and pushed back against the prosecutors’ argument that the audience at the event should also be considered victims.
“Every day since then, for the last couple of years, this case has been an international publicity sponge,” Barone said, adding: “There was no presumption, ever, of innocence for Mr Matar from the very beginning.”
Matar’s sentencing on Friday follows an intense trial during which Rushdie was the key witness.
Speaking from the stand in February, Rushdie said: “I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in. My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.” In total, Matar had stabbed Rushdie 15 times – in the head, neck, torso and left hand, resulting in severe injuries to his right eye, liver and intestines.
Following the attack, Rushdie was left permanently damaged in his right eye..
Matar’s motivation for trying to kill Rushdie stemmed from a 2006 speech delivered by Hezbollah’s chief at the time, Hassan Nasrallah, according to a federal indictment. In his speech, Nasrallah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or death warrant, placed on Rushdie by Iranian religious leaders more than 35 years ago as a result of his novel, The Satanic Verses.
Following Rushdie’s stabbing, Matar admitted in 2022 to having read only “a couple pages” of the book which Iranian religious leaders denounced as blasphemous.
The Indian-born British-American novelist later detailed his experience and long road to recovery in a memoir called Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.
The Associated Press contributed reporting.
