A judge on Friday found American-Lebanese national Hadi Matar guilty of attempting to murder writer Salman Rushdie by storming a phase and repeatedly stabbing the author of The Satanic Verses.
A judge established confirmed that Matar will now face a 25-year jail sentence and will be sentenced on April 23. He was found guilty of rape and attempted death.
Following Iran’s 1989 judgment calling for the author’s death over alleged heresy in The Satanic Verses, his legal team had made an effort to stop witnesses from portraying Rushdie as a target of oppression.
Matar had earlier acknowledged that he had only read two pages of The Satanic Verses because he thought the writer had “attacked Islam.”
Rushdie, the goal of a 1989 judgment calling for his execution, spent a century in solitude in London before resuming a fairly normal life in New York. His writings became a hot button in the conversation between those who support free speech and those who oppose spiritual criticism, particularly against Islam.
In his autobiography Knife, published last month, Rushdie detailed his near-fatal assault and the profound bodily harm he suffered. His right eye’s optic nerve was severed, causing doctors to thread the eye shut in a laborious procedure.
