Hadi Matar has been sentenced for trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie with a knife in 2022. Photo / Getty Images
Hadi Matar has been sentenced for trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie with a knife in 2022. Photo / Getty Images
Hadi Matar was sentenced to 25 years for attempting to kill Salman Rushdie in 2022.
Rushdie was left blind in one eye and paralysed in one hand after the attack.
Matar also faces federal terrorism charges that could result in a life sentence.
An American-Lebanese man has been sentenced to 25 years in prison for trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie with a knife at a New York cultural centre in 2022.
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 in Chautauqua County Court for the attack on Rushdie and seven years for assault on the moderator of the speaking event, who was also on stage.
Judge David Foley ordered the sentences to run concurrently.
Matar also faces separate federal terrorism charges that carry a maximum penalty of life in prison.
Video of the attack was played during the trial and showed Matar rushing the stage and plunging a knife into Rushdie.
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie told jurors, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood.”
The optical nerve of Salman Rushdie’s right eye was severed in the attack. Photo / Getty Images
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 characterising 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.
Life-threatening injuries
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 paralysed 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.
His publisher announced in March that The Eleventh Hour, a collection of short stories examining themes and places of interest to Rushdie, will be released on November 4, 2025.
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 centre 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.
