The man who left Salman Rushdie partially blind after stabbing him at a lecture in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison Friday, May 16, The Associated Press reports.
Hadi Matar, 27, was convicted of attempted murder back in February, and the 25-year term handed down is the maximum penalty. Matar will also concurrently serve a seven-year sentence for his conviction on an assault charge, related to injuries inflicted on Ralph Henry Reese.
Matar spoke briefly at his sentencing hearing, calling Rushdie a hypocrite and a bully. “Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” he said. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”
Rushdie was not present at Friday’s hearing, though he reportedly submitted a victim impact statement for the judge to consider. A rep for Rushdie said the author did not intend to comment further.
In pushing for the maximum sentence for Matar, Jason Schmidt, District Attorney for Chautauqua County, told the judge that Matar “designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr. Rushdie, but upon this community.” Matar’s public defender, Nathaniel Barone, pushed for a 12-year sentence, pointing to his client’s clean criminal record.
At a press conference after the hearing, Schmidt said he was “pleased with the sentence that was imposed.” Barone did not immediately return a request for comment.
Rushdie was giving a lecture at New York’s Chautauqua Institution on Aug. 12, 2022, when Matar stormed the stage and stabbed the author more than a dozen times, blinding him in one eye. During the trial, Rushdie testified about the attack in great detail, saying at one point, “It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought.”
Along with Matar’s criminal case, he’s also facing federal terrorism charges, with a grand jury indicting him on three counts last July (he has pleaded not guilty). The federal indictment came down after Matar rejected a plea deal that would’ve covered both the state and federal cases and seen him serve a concurrent sentence of between 30 to 40 years in prison.
The federal case against Matar ties the attack back to the infamous fatwa that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued against Rushdie in 1989 over his depiction of the prophet Muhammad in his novel The Satanic Verses. The federal indictment alleges that Matar was partly motivated to attack Rushdie after watching a 2006 speech from a Hezbollah leader endorsing the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.
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