Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie sentenced to 25 years in prison

BarcelonaThe man who stabbed British writer Ahmed Salman Rushdie He has been sentenced to 25 years in prison and another five years of supervised release. This Friday, the Chautauqua County Court in New York issued the sentence against Hadi Matar, 27, of New Jersey, more than three months after he was convicted of attempted second-degree murder and assault earlier last year. The judge thus imposed the maximum sentence on Matar that the prosecution had requested, to which must be added 7 years for having attacked the moderator who accompanied the novelist on a conference stage in New York in August 2022. As a result of the attack, the writer was left blind in one hand, blind in one eye, and suffered nerve injuries in his arm.

Matar, who had pleaded not guilty and did not speak throughout the proceedings, called the writer a "hypocrite" on Friday, according to local media reports.

The Nobel Prize winner for literature had earlier described during the trial what he experienced the day Matar took the stage as he was about to begin a lecture, as part of the cultural events of the Chautauqua Institution, in the county of the same name, in New York, that he should dedicate himself to finding ways. "There was a lake of blood, which was clearly my own blood. I was bleeding a lot, and it became clear to me that I was dying," he said.

The writer explained during the hearing that he felt the pain "immediately, especially in the eye," that it was "the most painful stab wound." Rushdie, 77, who usually wears glasses with his right eye tinted to hide the aftermath of the attack, removed them during the hearing in the courtroom to show the jury the characteristics of his injuries. "As you can see, there is nothing left [of the eye]. I have no vision in that eye," he said.

Author's radicalization

Salman Rushdie had received several death threats after publishing the controversial novel The Satanic Verses, for the work's portrayal of the Prophet Muhammad. In fact, for this very reason Iran accused the writer of blasphemy and demanded a $3 million ransom from his boss. This would have been the pretext that prompted Matar, then only 24, to attempt to assassinate Rushdie. Although the young man's personality remains a mystery to the jury, in an interview with the tabloid New York Post –the only one he has offered since being arrested immediately after the attack– explained that he had spent countless hours watching sermons by Islamic preachers on YouTube in the basement of his home.

"I expected him to come back motivated, to finish his studies, to get a degree and a job. But instead, he locked himself in the basement," his mother explained in another interview, in which she referred to a trip Matar took in 2018 to the small Lebanese village where his father's family came from. It seems that this trip he took after his parents' divorce was the turning point in the young man's change of behavior.

Matar, who has dual Lebanese and American nationality, grew up in Fairview, New Jersey, a small commuter town near New York, and was raised by a Muslim family. Little else is known about his life, other than that he took boxing lessons and had worked for a well-known American discount chain. In any case, the young man was so determined to kill the renowned writer that he traveled 660 kilometers to get to the conference, spending a night in the open with a fake ID.