Article Author:
MAYVILLE — A Last Week , a man charged with stabbing novelist Salman Rushdie in western New York pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and assault charges at an arraignment hearing Thursday and was ordered to be held without bail.
Hadi Matar, 24, is accused of injuring 75-year-old Rushdie on Friday just before the author of "The Satanic Verse" lectured onstage at an educational retreat near Lake Erie. accused. Rushdie was hospitalized with serious injuries in what writers and politicians around the world condemned as an attack on free expression.
Matar filed an appeal against Chautauqua on the indictment returned earlier in the day by a grand jury indicting him for one count of attempted second-degree murder and one count of his. He was arraigned during a short hearing in the county district court. Second degree assault count.
The attack was followed by Iran's then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, calling on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie months after the publication of "The Satanic Verses" fatwa, Or happened 33 years after he issued the Religious Edict. Some Muslims viewed passages about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemy.
Born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family, Rushdie lived with a bounty on his head and has been in hiding for nine years under British police custody.
In 1998, President Mohammad Khatami's pro-reform Iranian government distanced itself from the Fatwa, saying the threat to Rushdie was over. But then the multi-million dollar prize pool was increased and the fatwa was never lifted. Khomeini's successor, Ayatollah Ali, his Supreme Leader Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 after he said a fatwa against Rushdie was "irrevocable."
In an interview published in the New York Post on Wednesday, Matar said he admired Khomeini, but did not say whether he was inspired by the fatwa. He said he had "read a few pages" of "The Satanic Verse" and said he had seen the author's YouTube video.
"I don't really like him," Matar said of Rushdie. "He is the one who attacked Islam. He attacked their beliefs, their belief systems." said not. Police say Matar is believed to have acted alone.
Matar is a Shia Muslim born in California to a family of Lebanese origin.
According to prosecutors, he went to the Chautauqua Institute, about 12 miles (19 km) from Lake Erie, where he purchased a pass for Rushdie's lectures.
Witnesses said there were no apparent security checks at the lecture venue and that Mattar did not open his mouth as he attacked the author.
Rushdie was severely injured in the attack, likely suffering nerve damage in his arm, liver damage and the loss of an eye, his agent said. (Reporting by Tyler Clifford of Mayville, NY; additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien of his of Chicago; editing by Frank McGurty and Bernadette Baum)
