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Salman Rushdie attacker faces sentencing
Hadi Matar, 27, faces up to 25 years in prison after being convicted of attempted murder and assault charges in February this year.
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AFP - Fri, 16, May 2025
- 03:48 EDT
- 51
Salman Rushdie / Facebook/Salman Rushdie
An American-Lebanese man will be sentenced on May 16 for trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack at a New York cultural center.
Hadi Matar, 27, faces up to 25 years in prison after being convicted of attempted murder and assault charges in February this year.
During the trial, Rushdie told jurors about Matar "stabbing and slashing" him during an event 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 legal team 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.
Iran has denied any link to the attacker and said only Rushdie was to blame for the incident.
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