US court sentences Salman Rushdie attacker Hadi Matar to 25 years in prison

Hadi Matar, convicted of stabbing author Salman Rushdie in 2022, has been sentenced to 25 years in prison. The attack left Rushdie blind in one eye and marked a major moment in free speech debate

A New York court on Friday (May 16) sentenced Hadi Matar, the man convicted of attacking Salman Rushdie in 2022, to serve 25 years in prison, according to a report by The Guardian.

 

Matar, 27, was found guilty of attempted murder and assault in February 2025. Before sentencing, Matar delivered a statement on freedom of speech, accusing Rushdie of being a hypocrite, according to a report by the Associated Press. He was also sentenced to seven years for wounding a man who was on stage with Rushdie during the event. However, both sentences must run concurrently as both victims were injured in the same incident, District Attorney Jason Schmidt said. 

 

The attack took place in August 2022 at the Chautauqua Institution, where Matar stabbed Rushdie 15 times — in the head, neck, torso, and hand. The assault left the Booker Prize-winning author blind in one eye.

 

The sentencing follows an intense trial during which Rushdie, in February, testified: “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.”

 

It marked the first time the two had come face to face since the attack.

 

Motivation behind the attack

 

According to the indictment, Matar was motivated to kill Rushdie after a 2006 speech delivered by Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s chief at the time, in which he endorsed the decades-old fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death. The fatwa was issued by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 following the publication of The Satanic Verses, which he denounced as blasphemous.

 

In 2022, Matar admitted that he had read only “a couple of pages” of the book. Last year, the book returned to Indian bookstores 36 years after it was banned by the Rajiv Gandhi government.