Man who blinded Salman Rushdie in one eye sentenced to 25 years

The man who attacked author Salman Rushdie, blinding him in one eye, was sentenced on Friday, 16 May, to 25 years in prison, the local prosecutor said.

Judge David Foley gave an unrepentant Hadi Matar at court in Mayville in New York State, near where the attack took place, for attempted murder.

He was convicted under state laws in February, and he faces separate terrorism charges under federal laws.

Matar, 27, also received a sentence of seven years that would run concurrently with the main sentence.

The district prosecutor for Chautauqua County, Jason Schmidt, said after the sentencing, "I'm pleased with the sentence that was imposed by the judge."

Matar's lawyer Nathaniel Barone said that he planned to file an appeal.

Matar rushed to the stage and attacked Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in August 2022 when the author, who was under a fatwa from Iran's Ayatollah, was about to speak.

Rushdie was stabbed several times, including in his right eye, which he lost and now wears an eye patch.

Henry Reese, who runs a programme to give persecuted writers asylum, was also injured during the attack.

Rushdie detailed the attack and its aftermath in a memoir published in 2024, "Knife".

The origins of the attack go back to 1989, when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Rushdie's death, saying that his novel published the previous year, "The Satanic Verses," was blasphemous.

This forced Rushdie to hide under the protection of British authorities for several years, before he moved to New York and began to appear in public.

Before the sentencing, Matar told the judge Rushdie "wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don't agree with that".

Rushdie was disrespectful to other people, Matar said in a rambling statement in which he spoke incongruously about freedom of speech and religion.

"There's an irony to all of this," Schmidt said.

"His value system is that he can impose his own sense of justice and sentencing upon somebody who violates, you know, his value system."

Barone said Matar was trying to let the court know that "he felt very strongly about his Muslim religion".

He noted that while some may have agreed with Matar, other Shia Muslims said, "What happened is wrong."

When federal charges were filed against Matar in July, Merrick Garland, who was then the attorney general, said he "committed an act of terrorism in the name of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organisation aligned with the Iranian regime".

Barone said that a hearing in the case was expected in July, and he expected the trial to start early next year.

In the US legal system, there are separate -- and sometimes overlapping -- federal and state laws with separate state, local and federal court systems, and people can be tried on different charges in those courts.