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First Post
16-05-2025
- First Post
Salman Rushdie attacker sentenced to 25 years for 2022 onstage stabbing
Hadi Matar, 27, who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday read more Defendant Hadi Matar arrives for his trial on charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault dating to an attack on Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, at Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, US, on February 11, 2025. Reuters File The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, the district attorney said. Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel 'The Satanic Verses,' which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie's death, an edict known as a fatwa. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Hadi Matar, 27, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, in February. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge. Video that captured the assault shows Matar rushing the Chautauqua Institution's stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Some of the video was shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony. 'He's traumatized. He has nightmares about what he experienced,' Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered. 'Obviously this is a major setback for an individual that was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa.' Also hurt in the attack was Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh's City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning. Schmidt said Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second degree attempted murder charge stemming from the attack against Rushdie and seven years for a second degree assault charged for the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will run concurrently. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Rushdie, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand. The attack blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery. Matar did not testify at his trial. His defense lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault. Matar's attorney Nathaniel Barone said his client will file an appeal. 'I know if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he's sitting today. And if he could change things, he would,' Barone said. Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the US attorney's office in Western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism. Prosecutors accuse him of providing material support to Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Yahoo
Assailant who stabbed author Salman Rushdie sentenced to 25 years
(Reuters) - The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, the district attorney said. Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses," which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie's death, an edict known as a fatwa. Hadi Matar, 27, a U.S. citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, in February. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge. Video that captured the assault shows Matar rushing the Chautauqua Institution's stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Some of the video was shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony. "He's traumatized. He has nightmares about what he experienced," Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered. "Obviously this is a major setback for an individual that was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa." Also hurt in the attack was Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh's City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning. Schmidt said Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second degree attempted murder charge stemming from the attack against Rushdie and seven years for a second degree assault charged for the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will run concurrently. Rushdie, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand. The attack blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery. Matar did not testify at his trial. His defense lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault. Matar's attorney Nathaniel Barone said his client will file an appeal. "I know if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he's sitting today. And if he could change things, he would," Barone said. Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office in Western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism. Prosecutors accuse him of providing material support to Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization. Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.
The Star
16-05-2025
- The Star
Assailant who stabbed author Salman Rushdie sentenced to 25 years
Author Salman Rushdie poses during a photocall ahead of the presentation of his book "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder" at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Germany, May 16, 2024. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch/File Photo (Reuters) - The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also wounded a second man, the district attorney said. Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses," which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie's death, an edict known as a fatwa. Hadi Matar, 27, a U.S. citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, in February. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge. Video that captured the assault shows Matar rushing the Chautauqua Institution's stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Some of the video was shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony. "He's traumatized. He has nightmares about what he experienced," Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered. "Obviously this is a major setback for an individual that was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa." Also hurt in the attack was Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh's City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning. Schmidt said Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second degree attempted murder charge stemming from the attack against Rushdie and seven years for a second degree assault charged for the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will run concurrently. Rushdie, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand. The attack blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery. Matar did not testify at his trial. His defense lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had failed to prove beyond reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault. Matar's attorney Nathaniel Barone said his client will file an appeal. "I know if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he's sitting today. And if he could change things, he would," Barone said. Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office in Western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism. Prosecutors accuse him of providing material support to Lebanon's militant Hezbollah group, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization. Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo. (Reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Chicago; Editing by Frank McGurty and Frances Kerry)
New Indian Express
23-04-2025
- Politics
- New Indian Express
End of the Kashmiri summer: Is Pahalgam the payback for the Jaffar Express hijacking?
As the unspeakable horror of Pahalgam began playing out on Tuesday, my phone began getting flooded with messages from friends in Jammu and Kashmir. " Aaj Kashmir mein insaniyat ka katal huwa… " said one. (Today in Kashmir, humanity was killed…) " Kuch mat keh sakte, aaj bahuut dukhi hai hum, sab roh rahe hain... " said another. ("I'm lost for words, deeply saddened, we are all in tears…") The brutal massacre of some 26 unsuspecting tourists happened in the upper reaches of Baisaran, near the tourist hub of Pahalgam, which had remained completely immune to terrorists' ire even at the height of the militancy in the late nineties. The attack has exploded the bubble that the Muslim Kashmiri would never be harmed. Operation Pahlagam has the Pakistan Army written all over it. A Pakistan Army, already bristling at the growing counter-narrative in recent months that Jammu and Kashmir had chalked up nearly 100,000 tourists in the first few weeks of April. A Pakistan Army looking to settle scores with an India that was cosying up not just to the United States, but to its former mentors, the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. And critically, a Pakistan Army that was shamed and embarrassed by the March 11 Jaffar Express hijacking, which saw the rebel Baloch Liberation Army, take control of a train travelling from Quetta in Balochistan to Peshawar in the north, and target over 200 Pakistan military personnel. Many of them were Punjabi-speaking and in mufti. It was an act that Rawalpindi has consistently, and with no proof whatsoever, blamed India for. Baloch insiders say that their gunmen went from compartment to compartment looking for Pakistan Army soldiers. Pahalgam saw the terrorists ask the victims their names before they shot them dead. Is Pahalgam the payback? And was the Pakistan Army Chief General Hafiz Asim Munir's invective-ridden anti-India speech at the Kakul Military Academy last week, where he described Kashmir as 'the jugular vein', the red light, the signal that the false peace, to keep the Line of Control free from terror attacks, was at an end? It had been a promise made by the well-meaning former Pakistan Army Chief General Qamar Jawed Bajwa during his backchannel talks with senior Indian officials. The timing of the Pahalgam massacre to coincide with Prime Minister Narendra Modi's high-profile visit to the Saudi city of Jeddah, on the very day that US Vice President JD Vance and his Indian-origin wife were being feted in India, is a favoured Pakistan Army tactic. It was the same in 2000 when the Chattisinghpora massacre took place just as US President Bill Clinton touched down in Delhi. But more than a tad unnerving are the reports that are now emerging that the terrorists had foreknowledge of the antecedents of the group of tourists. Equally curious, is Pakistan's shift, training its guns on Muslim-dominant Kashmir, rather than the Hindu-centric Jammu. Kashmiri tourist agents in Srinagar freely admit that tourism may be a drop in the ocean when it comes to Kashmir's economy at barely 12%. But the footfalls in its famed apple and walnut orchards, the rise in house-boat rentals on Dal Lake, its AirBnbs, restaurants and dairy farms, have kept Kashmiris in good nick after years of unrest and violence; with the added bonus that schools and shops have stayed open. While some still fear that new laws could open the doors to Indians from outside Kashmir taking over their land and property, the separatists' cause has lost a fair bit of its sheen, as Muslim Kashmiris shed years of poverty and deprivation for a better life. To Kashmiris, therefore, Pakistan distancing itself from Pahalgam cuts little ice. The Resistance Front (TRF), which was quick to claim responsibility for the attack on the group of 40 tourists in the trekking trail, is of the Pakistan Army. Created to foment anger among the local populace after the 2019 bifurcation of the state after the abrogation of Article 370 and amalgamation of Jammu and Kashmir into the Indian Union as a Union Territory, it targeted Hindu Pandits and was behind the shocking attack on pilgrims in Reasi in 2024. Informed sources now say that the 100-250 strong TRF, maintains sleeper cells within Kashmir that it can activate at will, as it did in Pahalgam. The reasoning behind Pakistan staying the hand of terror groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-E-Mohammed until now, however, may have less to do with General Bajwa's promise and more to do with the fact that Pakistan's resources are stretched now. Not only does it have to contend with the BLA in Balochistan, which openly claims that while "the Pakistan Army is visible on the streets in the day, it's the BLA that rules at night", it has less than an amicable relationship with their former protege, the Taliban regime in Kabul. Rawalpindi accuses Kabul of giving shelter to the BLA and to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in Afghanistan, giving it a free run into its troubled Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. The TTP also has links to Islamic State (Khorasan), which operates across the Afghanistan-Pakistan badlands and has attacked Pakistan frontier posts at will. As India's top leadership wrestles with whether Pahalgam needs a Pulwama-like Balakot retaliation, the fact is General Asim Munir has raised the stakes by putting Delhi on the spot on how it levels the score. By raising, as many say, the prospect of a larger confrontation, the General may not have fully understood the Washington playbook. Pakistan's political elite, as much as the Army, has struggled to come to terms with the fact that, without a US military presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan has become largely irrelevant to the discourse. With President Donald Trump condemning Pahalgam, General Munir's ploy to get Trump's attention, and offer to intervene as he did when he served as president the last time, has run aground. But for India, it can no longer ignore the relentless terror threat from Rawalpindi, which has over the last year demonstrated that it can deploy militants from across the Line of Control at will. After Pahalgam, Delhi, which has clearly not broken the back of militancy, may refuse to restore statehood to J&K. It needs now to craft a punishing response to Rawalpindi's long game and knows that it needs Washington on its side. Will Vance hold the key? Neena Gopal is an author and foreign policy analyst.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Attacker who stabbed Salman Rushdie to be sentenced for attempted murder
Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed and partially blinded the novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a New York arts institute in 2022, is scheduled for sentencing on Wednesday, four months after he was found guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. He could receive up to 25 years in prison. The Chautauqua county court sentencing hearing will take place three miles from where Matar attacked Rushdie during an address at a literary festival on the theme of 'home' and keeping writers safe from harm. In one of the few comments Matar made after he was arrested following the attack at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, the 27-year-old told the New York Post that he had traveled from his home in New Jersey after seeing the Rushdie event advertised because he disliked the novelist. Matar claimed that Rushdie had attacked Islam. Rushdie, 77, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, inspired by the life of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous. 'I don't like the person. I don't think he's a very good person,' Matar said about Rushdie in the interview with the Post. 'I don't like him. I don't like him very much. He's someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.' During the two-week trial, the defence lawyer Andrew Brautigan argued that prosecutors had not proved beyond reasonable doubt that Matar, a dual citizen of his native US and Lebanon, had the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault. Matar pleaded not guilty and was later convicted of attempted murder in the second degree. The attack on Rushdie took place on 12 August 2022 on the Chautauqua Institution stage as he was being introduced to the audience. Rushdie was stabbed with a knife – 15 times in total – in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines. His injuries required emergency surgery and months of recovery. During his testimony, Rushdie calmly described to jurors that he believed he was going to die. He said he was sitting in a chair on the stage, facing his co-speaker Henry Reece and the audience, when 'this assault began'. 'I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right-hand side. I was aware of someone with dark hair and dark clothes … I was struck by his eyes which seemed dark and ferocious to me,' Rushdie said, adding: 'He hit me very hard around my jawline and neck. Initially I thought he'd punched me with his fist, but very soon afterwards I saw a large quantity of blood pouring on to my clothes. He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing.' He continued: 'Everything happened very quickly. I was stabbed repeatedly, and most painfully in my eye. I struggled to get away. I held up my hand in self-defense and was stabbed through that.' Asked how many times he was stabbed, Rushdie said: 'I wasn't keeping score.' Rushdie described how he rose from his seat to get away from his attacker but fell. Speaking after the verdict earlier this year, the Chautauqua county district attorney, Jason Schmidt, said swift intervention by the Chautauqua Institution community 'saved Mr Rushdie's life'. Matar was also found guilty of assault on the man Rushdie was talking to on stage, Reese, who was wounded in the attack. Reese suffered a gash to his forehead. A separate trial for Matar on federal terrorism-related charges will be scheduled for later in US district court in Buffalo. Rushdie wrote about the attack and his long recovery from it in Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder. Later this year, he is set to publish a new collection, The Eleventh Hour, his first work of fiction since the attack. The book's publisher, Penguin Random House, says the work depicts the story of 'two quarrelsome old men in Chennai, India, who experience private tragedy against the backdrop of national calamity' and highlights 'mortality, Bombay, farewells, England (especially Cambridge), anger, peace, America, and Goya and Kafka and Bosch'.
