World Courant
Hadi Matar, mentioned man charged within the stabbing of Salman Rushdie two years in the past, rejected a plea deal that will have shortened his sentence in a state jail on Tuesday. Matar’s lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, mentioned he didn’t like a part of the deal that will have opened him as much as a federal terrorism cost, in response to The Related Press.
If Matar had agreed to the deal, he would have served as much as 20 years in state jail; with out the plea deal, he faces as much as 25 years. The AP experiences that the deal additionally included a federal cost of attempting to offer materials help to a terrorist group, which might set off an extra 20 years in jail. Matar, who was born within the US but additionally has Lebanese citizenship, has been held with out bail because the stabbing in the summertime of 2022.
Rushdie was giving a lecture at New York’s Chautauqua Establishment when a person stormed the stage and stabbed the writer greater than a dozen occasions, blinding him in a single eye. Authorities arrested and charged Matar, who lived in Fairview, New Jersey, that day. Matar’s mom noticed a change in her son after a visit to Lebanon, the place he visited his father in 2018, in response to The AP.
The depiction of the prophet Muhammad in Rushdie’s 1988 guide, The Satanic Verses, sparked the ire of Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa the next yr calling for Rushdie’s dying. Khomeini died that yr, and since solely the one who issued a fatwa can withdraw it, in response to customized, some imagine it nonetheless stands. The menace led Rushdie to stay in hiding for a number of years, a interval he chronicled in his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton. Matar, who was 26, was born within the late Nineties, properly after each the issuance of the fatwa and Khomeni’s dying.
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“I respect the ayatollah,” Matar mentioned in a 2022 interview with The New York Put up. “I believe he is an awesome individual.” In the identical interview, he mentioned he’d “learn, like, two pages” of The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie detailed the assault in a brand new memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Tried Homicide, which got here out earlier this yr.
