a person accused stabbing the novelist Salman Rushdie He pleaded not responsible to second-degree homicide and assault prices throughout a listening to Thursday final week in western New York and was ordered to be held with out bail.
Hadi Matar, 24, is accused of injuring 75-year-old Rushdie on Friday simply earlier than “The Satanic Verses” The writer was to lecture on stage at an academic retreat close to Lake Erie. Rushdie was hospitalized with critical accidents, which was decried by writers and politicians all over the world as an assault on freedom of expression.
Matar was indicted in Chautauqua County District Court throughout a short listening to on a returned indictment by a grand jury earlier within the day, which charged him with one depend of tried second-degree homicide and one depend of second-degree assault. Imposed.
The assault comes 33 years after Iran’s supreme chief on the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or spiritual order, calling on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie, months after “The Satanic Verses” was printed. Some Muslims noticed passages in regards to the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemy.
Rushdie, who was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri household, lives with a bounty on his head, and has spent 9 years in hiding underneath British police safety.
In 1998, the pro-reform authorities of Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa, saying the menace in opposition to Rushdie was over. But since then the bounty has elevated to a whole bunch of tens of millions of {dollars} and the fatwa has by no means been eliminated: Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for calling the fatwa in opposition to Rushdie “irreversible.”
In an interview printed by the New York Post on Wednesday, Matar mentioned he revered Khomeini however wouldn’t say whether or not he was impressed by the fatwa. He mentioned he “read a few pages” of “The Satanic Verses” and watched the writer’s YouTube movies.
“I don’t like him very much,” Matar mentioned of Rushdie, as defined within the publish. “He is someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, belief systems.”
Iran’s overseas ministry mentioned on Monday that Tehran shouldn’t be accused of involvement within the assault. Matar is believed to have acted alone, police have mentioned.
Matar is a Shia Muslim who was born in California to a Lebanese household.
Prosecutors say he traveled to the Chautauqua Institution, about 12 miles (19 km) from Lake Erie, the place he purchased a cross for Rushdie’s lectures.
Witnesses mentioned that there was no clear safety test on the lecture venue and that Matar didn’t communicate as he attacked the writer. He was arrested on the scene by a New York State Police officer after members of the viewers wrestled on the bottom.
His agent mentioned Rushdie suffered critical accidents within the assault, together with injury to a vein in his arm, wounds to his liver, and doable lack of an eye fixed.
With inputs from TheIndianEXPRESS
