Status: 08/18/2022 04:29 am
Salman Rushdie’s alleged attacker gives an interview from prison. According to his own statement, the accused did not expect the star author to survive.
Salman Rushdie’s alleged attacker says he is “surprised” that the star author survived the attack.
He decided to go to the event with Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York after seeing a tweet announcing his performance last winter, Hadi Matar said in an interview with the New York newspaper Post” from prison, and: “I don’t like this person. I don’t think he’s a very good person. He’s someone who attacked Islam. He attacked our beliefs, the belief system.”
Rushdie on the mend
Matar, 24, is accused of stabbing Rushdie at the event at the Chautauqua Institution last Friday. The 75-year-old author sustained injuries to his liver, nerves in an arm and an eye were severed. According to his management and his son Zafar, Rushdie is now on the mend. The crime sparked outrage and outrage around the world.
Rushdie has received death threats since the publication of his book The Satanic Verses, which many Muslims consider blasphemous. In 1989, the late Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against the author calling for his killing.
Matar denies contacts with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard
Matar said in the interview that he considers Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, to be a “great person”. But he would not say whether he had followed his fatwa against Rushdie. Matar added that he had no contacts with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He also only read “a few pages” of the book “The Satanic Verses”.
Matar, who lives in Fairview, New Jersey, also told the Post that he took a bus to Buffalo, New York the day before Rushdie was attacked and then took a ride to Chautauqua, about 40 miles away. There he bought a ticket at the education center and slept on the lawn the night before Rushdie’s performance on the premises.
Matar was born in the US but also has a Lebanese passport. His mother told reporters that he returned from a visit to his father in Lebanon in 2018 with a changed personality. Her son had fallen into a somber mood and withdrawn from his family.