Hadi Matar, 27, was sentenced to 25 years in prison after being found guilty of attempted murder of Salman Rushdie. This ruling comes after an intense trial where Rushdie recounted his near-fatal stabbing during a literary event in New York in 2022. Matar attacked Rushdie 15 times, causing severe injuries, including permanent damage to his right eye. Matar acted on motivations linked to a speech by Hassan Nasrallah that endorsed a fatwa against Rushdie for his novel, 'The Satanic Verses'. Rushdie later shared his recovery journey in a memoir titled 'Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.'
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.
Matar's motivation for trying to kill Rushdie stemmed from a 2006 speech delivered by Hezbollah's chief at the time, Hassan Nasrallah.
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