Hadi Matar, convicted of stabbing writer Salman Rushdie at a lecture in New York in 2022, which left Rushdie blind in one eye, was sentenced today to 25 years in prison.
Matar was found guilty of attempted murder and assault in February, and today he was given the maximum sentence of 25 years in prison for attempting to murder Rushdie and seven years for wounding the man who was with him on stage, but they will not be combined, but will be served concurrently because that is what the law says, since both victims were wounded on the same occasion.
Rushdie, 77, was a key witness, describing how a masked assailant stabbed him in the head and body a dozen times while he was on stage speaking about the safety of writers.
Seeking the maximum sentence, prosecutor Jason Schmidt said that attacker Matar "chosen it himself" because he planned the attack "so that he could inflict the greatest damage, not only on Rushdie, but also against the 1.400 people who were in the audience who had to watch it."
Public defender Nathaniel Baron pointed out that Matar had no criminal record and disputed that people in the audience should be considered victims, and sought a sentence of only 12 years in prison.
After the attack, Rushdie spent 17 days in a hospital in Pennsylvania and more than three weeks in a rehabilitation center in New York, which he described in detail in his 2024 memoir, "The Knife."
Matar now faces a federal trial on terrorism charges. While the first trial focused largely on the details of the stabbing attack itself, the next one is expected to address the question of motive.
Authorities said Matar, a US citizen, was trying to enforce a "fatwa" issued in 1989 requiring all Muslims to kill Rushdie.
The then Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a "fatwa" over Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses," which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Rushdie was in hiding for years, but since Iran announced it would not enforce the "fatwa," he has been traveling freely for the past quarter of a century.
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