Salman Rushdie's attacker sentenced to 25 years in prison for 2022 stabbing case
The brutal attack left the popular author blind in one eye and seriously injured as he was stabbed over a dozen times in the head and torso. WORLD
An American-Lebanese man, who was found guilty of attempting to kill novelist Salman Rushdie, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday (May 16), the maximum for an attempt to murder.
Hadi Matar, 27, was convicted in February for stabbing Rushdie on stage during a 2022 lecture in western New York.
The brutal attack left the popular author blind in one eye and seriously injured as he was stabbed over a dozen times in the head and torso.
Matar stabbed him multiple times while he was preparing to deliver a lecture on a stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York State. During the stabbing, he also wounded another man on stage.
While reading from his forthcoming memoir, he said "I was seated at stage right. Then, in the corner of my right eye – the last thing my right eye would ever see – I saw the man in black running toward me down the right-hand side of the seating area. Black clothes, black face mask. He was coming in hard and low. A squat missile."
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At that time, Matar's legal team sought to prevent witnesses from characterizing Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran's 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in "The Satanic Verses."
The Booker Prize-winning author of The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children spent 18 days in the hospital and three weeks in rehab after the knife attack.
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The Indian-born British-American author had received life-threatening injuries and underwent emergency surgery.
Why was Rushdie attacked?
It is believed that Rushdie was attacked because of his infamous novel The Satanic Verses, however, it's not confirmed.
He was attacked 33 years after Iran's then-leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against him over the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988.
A year later the ex-Iranian leader had called upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in its publication for blasphemy. Following this, the author spent years hiding under death threats from Iran.