Source : NEW INDIAN EXPRESS NEWS
In requesting the maximum sentence, Schmidt told the judge that Matar “chose this. He designed this attack so that he could inflict the most amount of damage, not just upon Mr. Rushdie, but upon this community, upon the 1,400 people who were there to watch it.”
Public defender Nathaniel Barone pointed out that Matar had a otherwise clean criminal record and disputed that the people in the audience should be considered victims, suggesting that a sentence of 12 years would be appropriate.
“Every day since then, for the last couple of years, this case has been an international publicity sponge,” Barone said. “There was no presumption, ever, of innocence for Mr. Matar from the very beginning.”
Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center. The author of “Midnight’s Children,” “The Moor’s Last Sigh” and “Victory City” detailed his recovery in his 2024 memoir, “Knife.”
Matar next faces a federal trial on terrorism-related charges. While the first trial focused mostly on the details of the knife attack itself, the next one is expected to delve into the more complicated issue of motive.
Authorities said Matar, a U.S. citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 70 miles (112.6 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.
Matar believed the fatwa, first issued in 1989, was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, according to federal prosecutors.
Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa after publication of Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding, but after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree he traveled freely over the past quarter century.
SOURCE :- NEW INDIAN EXPRESS
