Man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie jailed for 25 years

The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prize-winning author blind in one eye, was sentenced on Friday to serve 25 years in prison.

A jury found Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of attempted murder and assault in February.

Rushdie did not visit the western New York courtroom for his assailant’s sentencing but submitted a victim impact statement. During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the key witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution in New York state to speak about writer safety.

Before being sentenced, Matar stood and made a statement about freedom of speech, in which he called Rushdie a hypocrite.

Matar received the maximum 25-year sentence for the attempted murder of Rushdie and seven years for wounding a man who was on stage with him. The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, District Attorney Jason Schmidt said.

In requesting the maximum sentence, Mr Schmidt told the judge that Matar “chose this”.

“He designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it,” he said.

Public defender Nathaniel Barone pointed out that Matar had an otherwise clean criminal record and disputed that the people in the audience should be considered victims, suggesting that a sentence of 12 years would be appropriate.

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

Matar next faces a federal trial on terrorism-related charges. While the first trial focused mostly on the details of the knife attack itself, the next one is expected to delve into the more complicated issue of motive.

Authorities said Matar, a US citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death when he travelled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 112km south-west of Buffalo.

Matar believed the fatwa, first issued in 1989, was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, according to federal prosecutors.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa after publication of Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding, but after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree, he had travelled freely over the past 25 years.

Matar pleaded not guilty to a three-count indictment charging him with providing material to terrorists, attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah and engaging in terrorism transcending national boundaries.

Video of the assault, captured by the venue's cameras and played at trial, show Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife. As the audience gasps and screams, Rushdie is seen raising his arms and rising from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.

Jurors in Matar's first trial delivered their verdict after less than two hours of deliberation.