MAVELLE, New York, Aug 18 (Reuters) – The man accused of stabbing writer Salman Rushdie last week in western New York pleaded not guilty to charges of attempted second-degree murder and assault on Thursday and was held without bail under warranty.
Hadi Matar, 24, is accused of stabbing Rushdie, 75, on Friday just before The Satanic Verses author was to give a lecture on stage at an education center near Lake Erie. Rushdie was hospitalized with serious injuries in what writers and politicians around the world described as an attack on freedom of expression.
Mattar was arraigned in Chautauqua County District Court on an indictment returned earlier in the day by a grand jury that charged him with one count of attempted second-degree murder, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, and one count of second- graded assault.
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He has been in jail since his arrest and was wearing a gray striped jumpsuit, a white COVID-19 face mask and his hands were shackled.
Judge David Foley ordered Mattar to have no contact with Rushdie and agreed to a request by his defense attorney to issue a temporary order barring the parties from discussing the case in the media. He said he would consider the defense’s request to release Matar on bail.
Matar will return for another hearing next month.
The attack came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s then-supreme leader, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to kill Rushdie several months after The Satanic Verses was published. Some Muslims saw passages about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous.
Rushdie, who was born in India to a Kashmiri Muslim family, lived with a bounty on his head and spent nine years in hiding under British police protection.
Hadi Matar appears in court on charges of attempted murder and assault against writer Salman Rushdie in Mayville, New York, U.S., August 18, 2022. REUTERS/Lindsay DeDario
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In 1998, Iran’s pro-reform government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa, saying the threat against Rushdie had been dropped.
But the multimillion-dollar award has since grown, and the fatwa was never overturned: Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for saying the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.”
In an interview published by the New York Post on Wednesday, Matar said he respected Khomeini but did not say whether he was inspired by the fatwa. He said he had “read a few pages” of The Satanic Verses and watched the author’s YouTube videos.
“I don’t like him very much,” Matar said of Rushdie, as reported in the Post. “He is a man who attacks Islam, he attacks their beliefs, belief systems.”
Iran’s foreign ministry said Monday that Tehran should not be blamed for the attack. Matar is believed to have acted alone, police said.
Matar is a Shia Muslim born in California to a Lebanese family.
Prosecutors say he traveled to the Chautauqua Institution, a retreat about 12 miles (19 km) from Lake Erie, where he bought a pass to Rushdie’s lecture.
Witnesses said there were no apparent security checks at the venue and that Matar did not speak while attacking the author. He was arrested at the scene by a New York State trooper after being tackled to the ground by members of the public.
Rushdie suffered severe injuries in the attack, including nerve damage in his arm, lacerations to his liver and possibly the loss of an eye, his agent said. But his condition has been improving since the weekend and he was taken off a ventilator.
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Reporting by Tyler Clifford in Mayville, New York; additional reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Frank McGurty, Bernadette Baum, Deepa Babington and Daniel Wallis
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