Hadi Matar, in the court of Chautauqua county, in Mayville, New York, on May 16, 2025. Photo: Adrian Kraus / AP / Profimedia
Writer Salman Rushdie was declared “satisfied” on Monday that the American justice sentenced to 25 years in prison, the maximum punishment, on Hadi Matar, the American-Libanese citizen who attacked him with the knife in 2022, during a conference, writes AFP.
“I am pleased that he received the maximum punishment and I hope he will use it to reflect on his actions,” the American-British writer, considered a symbol of freedom of expression, told the BBC.
Hadi Matar was sentenced on May 16 to 25 years of detention, after being found guilty of attempted murder and aggression. On August 12, 2022, he stabbed the author of “satanic verses”, a controversial book that brought Salman Rushdie to death for blasphemy, in 1989, from Iran, notes Agerpres.
The 77-year-old American-British writer of Indian origin lost his right eye, Adam's apple was lacerated, the liver and intestine were perforated, and the severe nerve lesions on his arm were paralyzed at one hand.
The attack took place in front of almost a thousand people at a conference on protecting the freedom of writers in a peaceful region at the border with Canada. Rushdie was saved from the intervention of some spectators.
“I doubt he would open his soul”
The writer spoke about this attack in his book “knife”, in which he imagines a conversation with Hadi Matar.
“If I were to really meet him, (…) I probably wouldn't get too much from him,” Salman Rushdie told the BBC. “I doubt they would open their soul,” the writer added.
“So I thought I could open it myself: I would probably do it better than a real conversation,” added the author.
Hadi Matar did not say whether he wanted to implement Fatwa issued in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, then the leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
He told the press that he had read only two pages of the “satanial verses”, but explained that he considered Rushdie guilty for “attacking Islam”.
