A New Jersey man who stabbed and partially blinded Sir Salman Rushdie on a New York conference scene was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday.
Hadi Matar, 27, was found guilty of attempted murder and assault earlier this year.
Sir Salman was on stage speaking in front of an audience in August 2022, when he was stabbed several times in the face and neck. The attack left him blind with an eye, a pity to his liver and a paralyzed hand caused by nervous lesions to his arm.
The attack occurred 35 years after the controversial novel by Sir Salman, The Satanic Verses, which had long made him the target of death threats for his representation of the Prophet Muhammad.
Matar suffered the maximum sentence of 25 years for the attempted murder of Sir Salman.
He was also found guilty of assault for having injured the person who interviewed Sir Salman, Henry Reese, and sentenced to seven years over three years after the Liberation for this assault.
The convictions must be carried out simultaneously because the two victims were injured in the same event, said the County of Chautauqua, Jason Schmidt on Friday.
Before being condemned, Matar got up and made a declaration on freedom of expression in which he called Rushdie a hypocrite, according to the Associated Press.
“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, dressed in prison clothes with white stripes and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a tyrant, he wants to intimidate others. I don’t agree with that.”
Sir Salman was not in court for the conviction of his attacker on Friday.
Matar was found guilty of attempted murder and aggression in February 2025, following an intense trial during which Sir Salman detailed the moment when he felt certain that he was going to die.
During the two -week trial, he testified that he had seen a man rushing to him on stage at the Historical Institute of Chautauqua Arts, New York.
He said that the eyes of his attacker “were dark and seemed very ferocious”.
Sir Salman told court that he did not realize that he had been stabbed, rather thinking that he had been struck.
Matar stabbed Sir Salman 15 times in total, especially in the cheek, chest, eyes, neck and thigh.
The prosecutors argued that the attack was targeted.
“There were a lot of people in this day, but there was only one person who had been targeted,” the lawyer told Jason Schmidt to the jury.
Defense lawyer Andrew Brautigan had argued that prosecutors had not proven that Matar intended to kill Sir Salman.
Matar, who pleaded not guilty, did not testify for his defense. His lawyers did not call any witness to their own witnesses.
“I don’t think he is a very good person,” said Matar about the author in a New York post story in 2022. “It was someone who attacked Islam.”
Matar congratulated the supreme leader of Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini, for having called for the execution of Sir Salman.
The attack took place about 35 years after the publication of Sir Salman’s controversial novel, The Satanic Verses.
The novel, inspired by the life of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, sparked outsourcing among some Muslims, who considered its contents as blasphemous.
Sir Salman faced countless death threats and was forced to hide for nine years after the religious leader of Iran published a Fatwa – or a decree – calling for the death of the author because of the book.
But in recent years, the author has said that he thought that threats against him had decreased.
Just before the attack, Sir Salman told a German magazine that he thought that his life was “relatively normal”.
The British-Indian novelist later detailed his experience and his long way to recovery in a memory called Knife: meditations after an attempted murder.
