US Court sentences Hadi Matar, attacker of Salman Rushdie 25 years of prison
A 25-year prison sentence has been delivered to the man who was found guilty of stabbing writer Salman Rushdie, leaving him blind in one eye.
Aadrika Tayal 
New Delhi (India) May 17: Salman Rushdie was blinded in one eye after being stabbed by a man who was given the punishment of 25 years in jail.
Hadi Matar, 24, rushed to the stage of an auditorium in August 2022 when Rushdie was giving a public talk for the Chautauqua Institution in New York.
Matar attacked Rushdie's head, neck, and body with about fifteen stab wounds. After being airlifted to a hospital, Rushdie finally lost one eye's sight. A stab wound was among the injuries suffered by another speaker, Henry Reese who is the director of a nonprofit organisation for authors.
The 77-year-old writer was the main witness during the trial, explaining how, while being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak on writer safety, a masked attacker stabbed him more than a dozen times in his head and body, making him feel as if he was dying.
After less than two hours of discussion, a jury in western New York sentenced Matar guilty on February 21 of the attack for injuring Reese and the attempted murder for attacking Rushdie.
Due to the fact that the attacks occurred at the same time, Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the attempted murder and seven years in prison for the assault on Reese during Friday's hearing.
Matar's defence team argued that the prosecution had not proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Rushdie had the goal to murder him, and they had asked for a reduced term of 12 years in prison. They plan to appeal the decision.
In his statement, Matar has called Rushdie a hypocrite.
According to the prosecution, the attack was an attempt to carry out a decades-old fatwa that Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared in 1989 after the release of Rushdie's controversial book, The Satanic Verses. Although Iran later declared it would no longer carry out the fatwa, which ordered Rushdie's death, it was widely criticised.
Prosecutors said that Matar thought the order was still in place and that Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, had repeated it in 2006.
Salman Rushdie provided a written victim impact statement but did not attend the sentence.
After the attack, Rushdie was hospitalized and rehabilitated for about five weeks. Later, in his memoir Knife, published in 2024, he described his recovery.
Aadrika Tayal
