Author Salman Rushdie’s attacker, Hadi Matar, has said he was surprised to know that the skilled author had survived the assault.
The man charged with stabbing Salman Rushdie on a stage in western New York said in an interview that he was surprised to know the skilled author had survived the assault.
Talking to the New York Post from prison, Hadi Matar said he chose to see Salman Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution after he saw a tweet the previous winter about the author’s scheduled appearance.
“I don’t like him.” “I don’t think he is a very good human being,” Matar told the newspaper. “He is the person who attacked Islam. He criticised their beliefs, the systems’ beliefs,” he added.
Matar, 24, said he believes the deceased Iranian leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, was a good human being. However, he would not say if he was following a fatwa, or edict, issued by Khomeini in 1989 in Iran that demanded Salman Rushdie’s death after the writer published “The Satanic Verses.”
Iran has refused involvement in the assault. Hadi Matar, who resides in Fairview, New Jersey, said he hadn’t been in any touch with Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. He told the Post he had just read a few pages of “The Satanic Verses.”
Salman Rushdie, 75, experienced a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye, according to his agent, in the assault on Friday. His agent, Andrew Wylie, said his state has improved and he is on the way to recovery.
Matar, who is facing an attempt to murder and assault charges, told the Post he took a bus to Buffalo the previous day before the assault and then took a lift to Chautauqua, almost 40 miles away.
He purchased a pass to the Chautauqua Institution Grounds and then dozed off in the grass the previous night before Salman Rushdie’s scheduled talk.
Hadi Matar was born in the US. However, he holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. His mother told journalists in the interview that Hadi Matar changed after he returned from a trip to see his father in Lebanon in 2018.
She said that thereafter, he became moody and left his family.
