Salman Rushdie assailant sentenced to 25 years in prison

An American-Lebanese man was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack at a New York cultural center.

Hadi Matar, 27, was convicted in February of attempted murder and assault for the stabbing, which left Rushdie blind in one eye.

Matar received the maximum sentence of 25 years for the attack on Rushdie and seven years for assault on another attendee at the speaking event. The sentences are to run concurrently.

Rushdie, a British-American, told jurors during the trial about Matar "stabbing and slashing" him at the upscale cultural center.

"It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain," Rushdie said, adding that he was left in a "lake of blood."

Matar -- who shouted pro-Palestinian slogans on several occasions during the trial -- stabbed Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade.

He previously told media he had only read two pages of Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses," but believed the author had "attacked Islam."

Matar's lawyers had sought to prevent witnesses from characterizing Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran's 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in the novel.

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, U.S. February 11, 2025. Reuters

Iran has denied any link to the attacker and said only Rushdie was to blame for the incident.

The optical nerve of Rushdie's right eye was severed in the attack.

His Adam's apple was lacerated, his liver and small bowel penetrated, and he became paralyzed in one hand after suffering severe nerve damage to his arm.

Rushdie was rescued from Matar by bystanders. Last year, he published a memoir called "Knife" in which he recounted the near-death experience.

Rushdie's career

Rushdie, who was born in Mumbai but moved to England as a boy, was propelled into the spotlight with his second novel "Midnight's Children" (1981), which won Britain's prestigious Booker Prize for its portrayal of post-independence India.

But "The Satanic Verses" brought him far greater, mostly unwelcome, attention.

Rushdie became the center of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable under any circumstance.

Books and bookshops were torched, his Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher was shot several times.

Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for a decade after the 1989 fatwa, but for the past 20 years -- until the attack -- he lived relatively normally in New York.