Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie sentenced to 25 years in prison

The man found guilty of attempted murder of Salman Rushdie has been sentenced to 25 years in prison.

On Friday, the Chautauqua county court issued the sentence to Hadi Matar, 27, of New Jersey, nearly three months after he was first convicted of attempted murder in the second degree.

Matar’s conviction followed an intense trial during which Rushdie, 77, detailed the moment when he felt certain that he was going to die from Matar’s attack during a literary gathering in western New York state in 2022.

Speaking from the stand in February, Rushdie said: “I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in. My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.” In total, Matar had stabbed Rushdie 15 times – in the head, neck, torso and left hand, resulting in severe injuries to his right eye, liver and intestines.

Following the attack, Rushdie was left permanently damaged in his right eye. The attack also wounded Ralph Henry Reese, the moderator at Rushdie’s lecture.

Hadi Matar at court on his second day of his trial on 11 February 2025, in Mayville, New York. Photograph: Gene J Puskar/AP

Matar’s motivation for trying to kill Rushdie stemmed from a 2006 speech delivered by Hezbollah’s chief at the time, Hassan Nasrallah, according to a federal indictment. In his speech, Nasrallah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or death warrant, placed on Rushdie by Iranian religious leaders more than 35 years ago as a result of his novel, The Satanic Verses.

Following Rushdie’s stabbing, Matar admitted in 2022 to having read only “a couple pages” of the book which Iranian religious leaders denounced as blasphemous.

The Indian-born British-American novelist later detailed his experience and long road to recovery in a memoir called Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.