The suspect who allegedly stabbed Salman Rushdie on a lecture platform in western New York stated in an interview that he was shocked at the author’s survival. Hadi Matar claimed that he decided to attend Rushdie’s address at the Chautauqua Institution after seeing a tweet about it last winter. Hadi Matar spoke to the New York Post from behind prison.
‘I don’t like the individual,’ Matar told the newspaper. ‘He doesn’t seem like a very good person to me. He is a man who denigrated Islam. He disparaged their worldviews and belief systems.’
The late Iranian president Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was regarded by Matar, 24, as ‘a great person,’ but he wouldn’t specify if he was adhering to the order or fatwa that Khomeini issued in Iran in 1989 calling for Rushdie’s execution after the author wrote ‘The Satanic Verses.’
Iran has denied planning the attack. The Fairview, New Jersey resident Matar asserted that he had never spoken to a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. He told the Post that he had simply ‘read a couple pages’ of ‘The Satanic Verses.’
Rushdie, 75, was assaulted on Friday, his agency claims, and suffered injuries to his liver as well as severed nerves in an arm and an eye. His agent, Andrew Wylie, reported that his condition has improved and that he is making strides toward recovery.
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