Hadi Matar, o The man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie two years ago rejected a plea deal that would have shortened his state prison sentence Tuesday. Matar's attorney, Nathaniel Barone, said he didn't like the part of the deal that would open him up to federal terrorism charges, according to The Associated Press.
If Matar had agreed to the deal, he would have served up to 20 years in state prison. without the plea deal, he faces up to 25 years. The app says the deal also included a federal charge of attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization, which could carry an additional 20 years in prison. Matar, who was born in the US but also holds Lebanese citizenship, is being held without bail by the knife in the summer of 2022.
Rushdie was giving a lecture at New York's Chautauqua Foundation when a man stormed the stage and stabbed the author more than a dozen times, blinding him in one eye. Authorities arrested and charged Matar, who lived in Fairview, New Jersey, that day. Matar's mother saw a change in her son after a trip to Lebanon, where she visited his father in 2018, according to The app.
The depiction of the Prophet Muhammad in Rushdie's 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, drew the ire of Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued a fatwa the following year calling for Rushdie's death. Khomeini died that year, and since only the person who issued the fatwa can, according to custom, withdraw it, some believe it is still valid. The threat sent Rushdie into hiding for several years, a period he recounted in his 2012 memoir, Joseph Anton. Matar, who was 26, was born in the late 1990s, long after the fatwa was issued and Khomeni's death.
“I respect the ayatollah,” Matar said in an interview in 2022 The New York Post. “I think he's a wonderful person.” In the same interview, he said he “read, like, two pages.” The Satanic Verses.
Rushdie described the attack in a new memoir, Knife: Meditations after an assassination attemptwhich was released earlier this year.
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/salman-rushdie-hadi-matar-plea-deal-1235052573/
