The American man who publicly attacked novelist Sir Salman Rushdie in August 2022 has been sentenced to a 25-year term on Friday.
Hadi Matar, 27, was issued the sentence by a county court in Chautauqua, New York, three months after he was convicted of second-degree attempted murder.
Matar's conviction was the end result of an intense, protracted trial during which the 77-year-old author—the key witness—explained how he felt certain he would die after a masked Matar plunged a knife into his head and body fifteen times, just as Rushdie was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about writer safety, as per a Guardian report.
The vicious attack left Rushdie severely wounded, with a permanently blind right eye.
“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,” Rushdie told the court in February.
In a statement delivered to court before his sentencing, Matar attempted to justify his actions, calling Rushdie a “bully”.
“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.”
Authorities stated that Matar's motive had been to carry out a decades-old fatwa (Islamic edict) first issued against the prolific novelist in 1989 by Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, in response to the publication of 'The Satanic Verses', which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
As a result, Rushdie spent several years in hiding, only attending public events and travelling after Iran later announced that it would not be enforcing the fatwa.
Matar was also sentenced to seven years for wounding Ralph Henry Reese, the moderator at Rushdie’s lecture, who had been on stage at the time the crime took place. According to Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt, Matar’s two sentences will run concurrently, as both victims were injured at the same event, the Guardian report added.
“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.
The Indian-British novelist later detailed his experience and long road to recovery in a memoir called 'Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder'.
