Come on Matar, who tried to kill the writer Salman Rushdie, was sentenced to 25 years in prison.
Hadi Matar (27) was sentenced to 25 years in prison in a trial that concluded last week in the United States after several delays. Matar will spend the next XNUMX years behind bars for the attempted murder of author Salman Rushdie. Matar pleaded not guilty to the attack when he appeared in court. He was charged with attempted second-degree murder and second-degree assault.
One of the witnesses during the three-month trial was the writer himself, the target of an attack in the summer of 2022. Hadi Matar, an American of Lebanese descent living in New Jersey, attempted to kill him with 12 stab wounds to the back, face, and abdomen, on the eve of the writer's lecture in New York in front of a terrified audience.
The attack took place on August 12, 2022, and Salman Rushdie described the event, in which he almost died, in detail in his memoir titled "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder."
In an interview with The New Yorker, Rushdie said he had worked hard to avoid feelings of “accusation and resentment,” adding that he was “determined to look forward, not backward.” He also admitted that he had great difficulty writing fiction, as he had done in the years before the fatwa was issued. Instead of fiction, he said, he could write a memoir. He wrote extensively, but in the third person, about the fatwa in his 2012 book “Joseph Anton.”
"But what happened, this attack, it can't be told in the third person. I think it's a first-person story when someone sticks a knife in you. It's an 'I' story," Rushdie pointed out.
While on stage in New York, he suffered multiple stab wounds to the neck and chest. Although the shocked audience that attended the writer's lecture thought Rushdie was dead after the attack, as he lay in a pool of blood, it turned out that he had a pulse. He was rushed to the hospital by helicopter and after hours of surgery, he ended up on a ventilator.
The writer then lost sight in one eye, and was unable to use one hand. He also admitted that he had great difficulty writing for six months after the terrible event...
And it happened exactly 35 years after Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa and called for the execution of the writer for the novel "The Satanic Verses".
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