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New York, US
In an interview, the man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a lecture platform in western New York expressed his surprise at the author's survival after the attack. Hadi Matar, who spoke to the New York Post from behind bars, said he made the decision to attend Rushdie's speech at the Chautauqua Institution after seeing a tweet about it last winter.
Matar told the newspaper, âI donât like the person. I donât think heâs a very good person. Heâs someone who attacked Islam. He attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.â
The late Iranian president Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was regarded by Matar, 24, as "a great person," but he wouldn't specify if he was adhering to the order or fatwa that Khomeini issued in Iran in 1989 calling for Rushdie's execution after the author wrote the controversial book 'The Satanic Verses' that led to the fatwa.
Iran has denied being behind the attack. Matar, a resident of Fairview, New Jersey, claimed he had never spoken to a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. He claimed to have just read "a couple pages" of 'The Satanic Verses', according to the Post.
Rushdie, 75, was attacked on Friday and sustained injuries to his liver as well as severed nerves in an arm and an eye. His agent, Andrew Wylie, stated that he is making progress toward recuperation and that his condition has improved.
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The day before the attack, Matar, who is charged with attempted murder and assault, told the Post that he took a bus to Buffalo before taking a Lyft cab to Chautauqua, which was some 64 kilometres away. The night before Rushdie's scheduled speech, he purchased a pass to the Chautauqua Institution grounds and then slept out in the grass.
Though he has dual citizenship in both the US and Lebanon, where his parents were born, Matar was born in the US. During interviews, his mother stated that Matar returned transformed from a trip to meet his estranged father in Lebanon in 2018. She claimed that after the trip, he became grumpy and isolated himself from his family.
(with inputs from agencies)