Novelist Salman Rushdie promotes the German-language version of his e-book Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide in Berlin on Could 16, 2024. Within the e-book, Rushdie confronts the 2022 assault that left him blind in a single eye.
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Hadi Matar, the person who severely injured novelist Salman Rushdie in a 2022 stabbing assault, was sentenced Friday to 25 years in jail — the utmost for tried homicide.
Matar, 27, was discovered responsible of second-degree homicide in February for his assault on the writer on the nonprofit Chautauqua Establishment in New York state in August 2022. A knife-wielding Matar leapt onto the stage the place Rushdie was about to present a lecture, stabbing the writer a number of occasions within the face, neck, arm, stomach and eye.
The assault left Rushdie, now 77, partially blind and with everlasting nerve harm. The writer didn’t return to the Chautauqua County courtroom in Mayville, N.Y., for the sentencing, however did submit a sufferer impression assertion.
Choose David Foley additionally sentenced Matar to 7 years, to be served concurrently, for injuring the moderator who tried to cease the assault.
Hadi Matar (proper) and public defender Nathaniel Barone hearken to Chautauqua County Choose David Foley’s sentence in Chautauqua County courtroom in Mayville, N.Y., on Friday.
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Adrian Kraus/AP
Rushdie’s e-book The Satanic Verses, revealed in 1988, sparked offended protests within the Muslim world over its controversial depiction of the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Months earlier than his loss of life in 1989, Iran’s Supreme Chief, the Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a spiritual fatwa calling for Rushdie’s homicide.
At trial, the U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for the Western District of New York alleged Matar was performing on the fatwa. Matar, who lived in Fairview, N.J., on the time of the assault, has not cited the non secular decree as motivation, however has stated he disliked Rushdie, telling the New York Put up in a jailhouse interview that the writer had attacked Islam. In the identical interview, Matar admitted that he had learn solely about two pages of The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie himself testified on the February trial, telling the jury that the assailant struck him repeatedly. The novelist described being taken abruptly within the assault after which abruptly turning into conscious of “a very large quantity of blood pouring out onto my clothes.”
Matar’s protection crew argued that it wasn’t an open-and-shut case. “Something very bad did happen,” legal professional Lynn Schaffer acknowledged on the trial, including that the prosecution was required “to prove much more than that.”
Matar additionally faces federal terrorism expenses
Matar faces a separate trial on federal expenses of terrorism in reference to the assault on Rushdie.
When the costs had been filed final July, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray stated Matar “attempted to carry out a fatwa endorsed by [Hezbollah] that called for the death of Salman Rushdie — a fatwa issued in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini.” If convicted on the federal expenses — which embody offering materials assist to terrorists and conspiracy to kill a U.S. citizen — Matar faces life in jail. A trial date hasn’t been set.
The award-winning Rushdie, who’s an Indian-born British-American citizen, has written quite a few books. In addition to The Satanic Verses, he’s additionally writer of Midnight’s Youngsters, set in postcolonial India, and Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide, a memoir in regards to the assault that was revealed final yr.
