Rushdie attacker sentenced to 25 years in prison for attempted murder

A man who attacked writer Salman Rushdie with a knife in front of a stunned audience in 2022, leaving the award-winning author blind in one eye, was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday, UNN reports citing AP.

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Hadi Matar, 27, stood silently as the judge announced the sentence. He did not deny attacking Rushdie, and when invited to address the court before sentencing, Matar issued some final insults to the writer. He said he believed in freedom of speech, but called Rushdie a "hypocrite."

"Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people," Matar said. "He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don't agree with that."

Rushdie, 77, did not return to western New York for the sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement in which he said he has nightmares about what happened, said Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt. 

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Video footage of the attack, taken by cameras at the venue and shown at trial, shows Matar approaching a seated Rushdie from behind and reaching for him to stab him in the torso with a knife. As onlookers gasp and scream, Rushdie is seen raising his hands and rising from his seat, walking and stumbling a few steps, while Matar hangs on him, waving and stabbing with a knife, until they both fall and find themselves surrounded by onlookers who rush to separate them.

In February, jurors found Matar guilty of attempted murder and assault after deliberating for less than two hours.

Judge David Foley told Matar that he found it remarkable that he chose to try to kill Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution, a summer retreat that prides itself on the free exchange of ideas.

"We all have a right to have our own ideals; we all have a right to carry them," Foley said. "But when you prevent someone else from doing so by committing an act of violence, in the United States of America it must be a crime for which you must be held accountable."

The judge also sentenced Matar to seven years for injuring a person who was on stage with Rushdie, although that term will run concurrently with the other sentence.

After the attack, Rushdie spent 17 days in a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks in a New York rehabilitation center. The author of Midnight's Children, The Moor's Last Sigh, and Victory City detailed his recovery in his 2024 memoir Knife.

Matar's lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, asked the judge to sentence him to 12 years in prison, citing his lack of a criminal record.

Schmidt, the prosecutor, said Matar deserved the maximum sentence of 25 years, saying Matar "designed this attack to inflict maximum damage not only on Rushdie, but on the entire community, the 1,400 people who were there to witness it."

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Matar next faces federal court on terrorism-related charges. While the first trial focused primarily on the details of the knife attack itself, the next is expected to delve into the more complex question of motive. He pleaded not guilty. If Matar is convicted on the federal charges, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Authorities said Matar, a U.S. citizen, was trying to carry out a fatwa, or decree, issued decades earlier calling for Rushdie's death when he traveled from his home in Fairview, N.J., to attack Rushdie at a summer retreat about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.

Matar believed the fatwa, first issued in 1989, was supported by the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, according to federal prosecutors.

Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa after the publication of Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years on the run, but after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree, he traveled freely for the past quarter-century.