Attacker Who Blinded Salman Rushdie Sentenced To 25 Years

India-West News Desk

NEW YORK, NY – Hadi Matar, the man who nearly killed acclaimed author Salman Rushdie in a brutal 2022 attack, was sentenced on May 16 to 25 years in prison by a court in Chautauqua County. The sentencing comes nearly three months after the 27-year-old New Jersey resident was convicted of second-degree attempted murder.

Rushdie, 77, gave harrowing testimony during the February trial, recalling the moment he feared for his life after being stabbed 15 times during a public lecture in western New York. “I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in. My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying,” the Indian-born British-American author said from the witness stand.

The attack left Rushdie permanently blinded in his right eye and inflicted serious injuries to his liver, intestines, and left hand.

The court heard that Matar was inspired by a 2006 speech from Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who reaffirmed support for a longstanding fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 in response to Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses. Though Matar had only read “a couple pages” of the book, he told investigators he viewed Rushdie as a threat to Islam.

Rushdie, who spent years under threat following the fatwa, detailed the near-fatal encounter and his long recovery in a recent memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.