Man pleads NOT GUILTY to second-degree attempted murder of Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie

An Iranian sympathizer accused of brutally attacking author Sir Salman Rushdie has pleaded not guilty on Thursday to second degree attempted murder and assault charges. 

Hadi Matar, 24, was indicted by a grand jury on Thursday and charged with one count of second-degree attempted murder and one count of assault in the second degree.

He appeared in court later in the day wearing a gray-striped jumpsuit, a white COVID-19 mask with his hands shackled as District Attorney Jason Schmidt claimed: ‘His mission to kill Mr. Rushdie is greater in his mind and outweighs his personal freedom.’ 

Schmidt argued that Matar should be kept in custody as a trial into the attack proceeds, The Buffalo News reports.

Matar has previously pleaded not guilty to one count of attempted murder in the first degree and assault in the first degree for the attack on the Satanic Verses author on Friday. 

Authorities say the author, 75, had to undergo emergency surgery after Matar allegedly stabbed him a dozen times as he took to the stage to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institute during a New York literary festival.

Rushdie has since been hospitalized with severe injuries, and may even lose an eye after the brutal attack in Chautauqua, New York.

Matar has no previous criminal history, but faces up to 32 years in prison if he is convicted of the attempted murder and assault charges. 

He is now being held without bail and is due back in court on September 22.

Matar now remains at Chautauqua County Jail, where he slammed Rushdie for ‘attacking Islam’ in an interview from a prison cell. 

In an interview with the New York Post from the Chautauqua County Jail, Matar, from Fairvew, New Jersey, said that he was ‘surprised’ that the author survived.

He said: ‘I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person, I don’t like him. I don’t like him very much.

‘He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.’

Rushdie had suffered three stab wounds to the neck, four to the stomach, puncture wounds to his right eye and chest as well as a laceration on his right thigh.

When asked if he was inspired by Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the fatwa against Rushdie in 1989, Matar wouldn’t say – claiming his lawyer told him not to speak on the issue.

But he said: ‘I respect the Ayatollah. I think he’s a great person. That’s as far as I will say about that.’

Matar said that he was inspired to go to the lecture after seeing a tweet announcing Rushdie’s visit this year.

He denied that he had been in contact with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, but admitted he had watched videos of Rushdie on YouTube.

Officials believe that Matar travelled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to Buffalo via bus and used a ridesharing app to reach Chautauqua the day before the attack.

He later confirmed that he had taken a bus to Buffalo, before getting a Lyft to travel to the institute.  

Matar said: ‘I saw a lot of lectures, I don’t like people who are disingenuous like that.

‘I was hanging around pretty much. Not doing anything in particular, just walking around. I was just outside the whole time.’

He added that the Chautauqua Institution was a ‘nice place’, and that he slept in the grass the night before the attack. 

Matar has also complained about the food and conditions in the local jail, saying he is doing ‘alright’ but the food they have given him is ‘not allowed’ in his religion. 

 

Zafar Rushdie, 42, confirmed that his father had been taken off a ventilator over the weekend and had managed to speak a few words.  

Sources revealed on Monday that the author was awake and was helping investigators with the inquiries into the brutal attack.

But law enforcement sources have now revealed that the Booker-Prize winning author has been able to ‘articulate’ with investigators according to CNN.

It is unclear exactly what Rushdie told investigators about the attack, but authorities have confirmed that it is an ongoing investigation.

Friends also confirmed over the weekend that the author was off his ventilator and had been talking and joking with those at UPMC Hamot in Erie, Pennsylvania.

Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt that the attack was targeted and preplanned by Matar, and confirmed that he may lose his right eye.

Moderator Henry Reese also revealed his gruesome eye injury that he sustained on stage during the attack on Rushdie.

Asked how he was doing after the incident, Reese told the BBC: ‘I’m doing well, everything is proceeding – I’m doing quite well.

‘I think our concern is for Salman, and I mean that for himself, but also what he means in the world.’

Reese said it would be his ‘ideal’ to one day return to Friday’s venue and continue the conversation with Sir Salman.

Matar’s distraught mother Silvan Fardos, 46, told the DailyMail.com that her son had come back from a month-long trip to the Middle East as a religious zealot.

Fardos said FBI agents seized a number of items from her son’s basement apartment – including a computer, PlayStation, books, knives and a tool to sharpen blades.

She added that she expected her son to come back from the 2018 trip ‘motivated,’ but instead, her once outgoing and popular son returned a ‘moody introvert’ and would lock himself in the basement, refusing to speak to his family for months.

Matar, whose now-deleted Facebook page is plastered with pics of Iranian politicians, rushed onto the stage Friday morning at a literary festival in upstate New York as Rushdie was announced.

He stabbed him multiple times, before being pinned to the ground by horrified witnesses and was apprehended by a state trooper.

Nathaniel Barone, a public defender who represents Matar, said that his client was ‘very cooperative’ with the investigation.

Matar reportedly had a fake drivers license, cash, two Visa prepaid gift cards and no wallet on him at the time of his arrest.

The fake drivers licence was in the name of Hassan Mughniyah – names which are linked to infamous terrorist organization Hezbollah.

The group’s current leader is named Hassan Nasralla, an one of the group’s most notorious figures was Imad Mughniyeh, who was killed in a CIA-linked assassination in Syria in 2008.

Since the 1980s, the IRGC have been linked to Hezbollah, offering training and funding to the primarily Lebanon-based terrorist organization. Hezbollah’s logo is based on the IRGC’s.

 

Matar was born in the United States to Lebanese parents, who emigrated from Yaroun, a border village in southern Lebanon, and was not even born when the fatwa was issued.

Rushdie was issued a fatwa – a death sentence – in 1989 by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini after his book, the Satanic Verses, sparked and outcry with Muslims in Britain.

The book supposedly insulted the Prophet Mohammed and The Koran, with Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s death, and also called for Muslims to point him out to those who could kill him if they could not themselves.

Authorities descended on the Fairview, New Jersey home of Matar hours after he allegedly attacked Rushdie onstage.

Rushdie has previously received death threats for his writing, with the Satanic Verses resulting in a 1988 British culture war being sparked – with protests taking place in the UK along with book burnings.

In the ensuing riots, 60 people died and hundreds were injured, resulting in Pakistan banning the book.

Rushdie was put under round-the-clock security from 1989 to 2002, at the expense of the British taxpayer, when a $3 million bounty was put on his head.

He was forced to go into hiding for a decade with police protection, and previously said he received a ‘sort of Valentines card’ from Iran each year letting him know the country has not forgotten the vow to kill him.

In 2012, a semi-official Iranian religious foundation raised the bounty for Rushdie from $2.8 million to $3.3 million.

Other’s linked to the book have been attacked over the years, with Hitoshi Igarashi, who translated The Satanic Verses into Japanese, being stabbed to death on the campus where he taught literature.

Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator of the book, was also knifed in his apartment in Milan.

The novel’s Norwegian publisher William Nygaard, was shot three times outside his home and left for dead in October 1993, but survived the attack.

Rushdie previously wrote a 655-page fatwa memoir, which was nominated for the UK’s top non-fiction award, the Samuel Johnson prize.

During the fatwa he lived in permanent terror and at one point thought his ex-wife Clarissa Luard and their son Zafar, who was nine at the time, had been killed by assassins or kidnapped.

In 1998 Iran’s reformist president relaxed the fatwa and said it had no intention of tracking Rushdie down and killing him.

The Index on Censorship, an organization promoting free expression, said money was raised to boost the reward for his killing as recently as 2016, underscoring that the fatwa for his death still stands.