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Hadi Matar, 24, was officially charged Thursday by a New York court with attempting to kill and seriously injure British writer Salman Rushdie. The defendant pleaded not guilty, but the judge decided to keep him in preventive detention.
The suspect in the attempted murder of British author Salman Rushdie was charged Thursday in Chautauqua County, New York. Jurors today returned their indictment against Hadi Matar. They point to him as the person who went up to the stage where the writer was and as the person responsible for having stabbed him a dozen times. The incident occurred on August 12 at an educational center in New York.
The defendant was indicted on one count of attempted murder in the second degree, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, and also on one count of assault in the second degree. The suspect pleaded not guilty to all charges.
Matar, whose next hearing is scheduled for September, has been in jail since his immediate arrest after the attack.
Judge David Foley ordered him not to attempt to contact his victim, granting the defense attorney’s request for a temporary nondisclosure order prohibiting the parties from discussing the case in the media. The judge also stated that he would consider the defense’s request to release Matar on bail.
Hadi Matar, 24, appeared in a western New York courtroom after a grand jury indicted him on charges that he rushed the stage at the Chautauqua Institution and stabbed Rushdie multiple times in front of a horrified crowd. https://t.co/DO0iWRry8A
— CBS News (@CBSNews) August 18, 2022
After being airlifted to a hospital, Salman Rushdie was briefly placed on a ventilator before his condition improved. “The road to recovery has begun,” his agent said on Sunday.
On Wednesday, August 17, in an interview with the New York Post, Matar confessed that he was “amazed” that the author had survived the attack. “When I found out that he had survived, I was shocked,” Hadi Matar told the US newspaper, which contacted him in prison.
A religious decree calling for Rushdie’s death since 1989
The attack on the famous writer came 33 years after Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa (a religious decree) calling on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie.
The fatwa came after the publication of ‘The Satanic Verses’, a book by Rushdie that some Muslims consider blasphemous, since the author turned some moments of the life of the prophet Muhammad into fiction and in several countries this was understood as an offense.
Hadi Matar did not confirm whether he had been inspired by Khomeini’s fatwa, although he did confirm to the outlet that he has respect for the Ayatollah. “I think he’s an extraordinary person. That’s all I would say about it,” he stated. The suspect also told the newspaper that he had read “a few pages” of the novel.
“I don’t like this person (Rushdie). I don’t think he’s a good man,” he revealed to the New York Post. “I don’t like it, I really don’t like it,” he insisted. “He is about someone who has attacked Islam,” he added. Watching the author’s videos on YouTube, he thought he was a “hypocrite,” he continued.
On the other hand, he stated that he was not in contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and that he had learned through Twitter of Rushdie’s presence at a conference at a cultural center in Chautauqua, upstate New York.
Coming from New Jersey, he told the New York Post that he took a bus to the city of Buffalo and then a VTC (Transport Vehicle with Driver) to Chautauqua.
When Salman Rushdie walked onto the amphitheater stage, he lunged at him and stabbed him multiple times, including in the neck and abdomen.
Constant threats and years of living under police protection
Salman Rushdie was born on June 19, 1947 into a middle-class Muslim family in Bombay. His life turned upside down in 1988 with the publication of his book ‘The Satanic Verses’. Following Khomeini’s fatwa, a price was put on the author’s head and his novel was publicly burned. Rushdie spent years under another identity and protected by police officers.
In 1998, the reformist government of Iranian President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa, stating that the threat against Rushdie was over. But the religious leaders never formally lifted the assassination order. Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was even banned from Twitter in 2019 for declaring the fatwa against Rushdie “irrevocable.”
With AFP and Reuters
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