Hadi Matar: Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie – leaving author blind in one eye – is jailed

A man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie, leaving the author blind in one eye, has been jailed for 25 years.

Hadi Matar was found guilty of attempted murder and assault in February.

Prosecutors had been seeking the maximum sentence of 25 years for the attack in August 2022, along with an additional seven-year term for injuring a second man.

During the trial, Rushdie revealed he feared he was dying when the masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times.

The attack happened as the 77-year-old was introduced on stage at the Chautauqua Institution in New York for a discussion on writer safety.

Rushdie spent 17 days at a hospital in Pennsylvania and more than three weeks at a rehabilitation facility in New York City, as he recovered from his injuries.

Matar will next face a trial on terrorism-related charges. Prosecutors allege the 27-year-old was trying to carry out a decades-old fatwa calling for the author’s death.

In 1989 Iran’s then-leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued the fatwa in response to the publication of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous, causing the British-Indian author to go into hiding.

In 1998 Iran announced it would not enforce the decree, allowing Rushdie to travel freely over the last quarter of a century.

Mater pleaded not guilty to providing materials to terrorists, attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah and engaging in terrorism transcending national boundaries.

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