The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, the district attorney said.<\/p>\n
Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran\u2019s supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Hadi Matar, 27, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, in February. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge.<\/p>\n
Video that captured the assault shows Matar rushing the Chautauqua Institution\u2019s stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Some of the video was shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s traumatised. He has nightmares about what he experienced,\u201d Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered.<\/p>\n
\u201cObviously, this is a major setback for an individual that was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa.\u201d<\/p>\n
Also hurt in the attack was Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh\u2019s City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.<\/p>\n
Schmidt said Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second-degree attempted murder charge stemming from the attack against Rushdie and seven years for a second-degree assault charge for the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will run concurrently.<\/p>\n
Rushdie, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand. The attack blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.<\/p>\n
Matar did not testify at his trial. His defence lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault. Matar\u2019s attorney Nathaniel Barone said his client will file an appeal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI know if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he\u2019s sitting today. And if he could change things, he would,\u201d Barone said.<\/p>\n
Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the US attorney\u2019s office in Western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors accuse him of providing material support to Lebanon\u2019s Hezbollah group, which the US has designated as a terrorist organisation.<\/p>\n
Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, the district attorney said. Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9192,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9191","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-court-and-crime"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9191","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9191"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9191\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9193,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9191\/revisions\/9193"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9192"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9191"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9191"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/weeklyyoung.pk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9191"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}