MAYVILLE, N.Y. — The man convicted of stabbing Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in 2022, leaving the prizewinning author blind in one eye, is scheduled to be sentenced on Friday.
A jury found Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of attempted murder and assault in February.
Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said he will request the maximum 25 years in prison for the Aug. 12, 2022, attack on Rushdie and seven years for injuring a second man who was on stage with the author. The sentences must run concurrently because both victims were injured in the same event, he said.
Rushdie is not expected to return to court for his assailant's sentencing, the prosecutor said. During the trial, the 77-year-old author was the key witness, describing how he believed he was dying when a masked attacker plunged a knife into his head and body more than a dozen times as he was being introduced at the Chautauqua Institution to speak about writer safety.
Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center. The author of ''Midnight's Children,'' ''The Moor's Last Sigh" and ''Victory City'' detailed his recovery in his 2024 memoir, ''Knife.''
Matar next faces a federal trial on terrorism-related charges. While the first trial focused mostly on the details of the knife attack itself, the next one is expected to delve into the more complicated issue of motive.
Authorities said Matar, a U.S. citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie's death when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 70 miles (112.6 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.
Matar believed the fatwa, first issued in 1989, was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group's secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, according to federal prosecutors.
