The man accused of stabbing famous novelist Salman Rushdie last week in upstate Western New York pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault charges. Hadi Matar is being held now without bail.
Matar, 24, is accused of wounding Rushdie, 75, one week ago just before the author was to deliver a lecture on stage at an educational retreat near Lake Erie.
Rushdie was stabbed multiple times and then hospitalized with serious injuries. Writers and politicians around the world decried the attack on freedom of expression.
Matar was arraigned at the Chautauqua County Courthouse on an indictment returned earlier in the day by a grand jury that charged him with one count of second-degree attempted murder, which carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison, and one count of second-degree assault.
The attack on Rushdie came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to assassinate the writer few months after “The Satanic Verses” was published. Some Muslims saw passages about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous.
Rushdie was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family and has lived with a bounty on his head, spending nine years in hiding under British police protection.
In 1998, Iran’s pro-reform government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa, saying the threat against Rushdie was over.
But the multimillion-dollar bounty has since grown and the fatwa was never lifted: Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for saying the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.”
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