The 24-year-old gave the New York Post a video interview from prison. Author Salma Rushdie attacked Islam. The newspaper summary: The attacker became a terrorist more “accidentally” than by conviction.
“I attacked Salman Rushdie because he hated Islam and its value system.” For the first time since the attack that nearly took the life of the author of The Satanic Verses, his attacker Hadi Matar has spoken out about his motives. In an exclusive video interview with the New York Post from the prison, published on Wednesday, he also expressed his admiration for the late Iranian revolutionary leader Ruhollah Khomeini.
Born in New Jersey, the 24-year-old explained to his Lebanese parents the reasons that led him to attack Rushdie. “He attacked Islam, the Islamic faith, the value system. He’s not a good person. I don’t like him at all,” said the young man, who stabbed the writer 10 times last Friday before he took part in an event in Chautauqua. speaking in upstate New York.
Matar emphasized that he has no contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, as some media outlets have claimed in recent days. But he admitted to “respecting” Ayatollah Khomeini, who issued the 1989 fatwa against Rushdie, offering a $3 million bounty on his head. “I think he’s a great person,” Matar said of Khomeni, implying that his lawyer had warned him not to comment further on the matter.
Photos of Khomeini and Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, killed by the US, were found on their social media accounts. Investigators therefore suspected that Matar was close to Shia extremism and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard (Pasdaran). Furthermore, the false ID he had in his pocket after his capture was made to a Hezbollah “martyr”.
Apparently radicalized on the Internet
But what emerges from his opening words is, above all, a portrait of a loner who has become radicalized via the internet and social media in his bedroom in Fairview, New Jersey, according to the New York Post. He became a terrorist more “accidentally” than conviction. At least that’s what he and his lawyer likely wanted investigators to believe to get a lighter sentence, according to observers.
Matar also admitted that he was unfamiliar with Rushdie’s books, but had seen many videos of him on Youtube. “I only read a few pages” of The Satanic Verses, he explained. “But I’ve seen a lot of his lectures, I don’t like fake people like him.” However, he did not respond to questions about a trip to the Middle East in 2018, from which his mother Silvana Fardos claimed in another exclusive interview with the Chron, that he came back changed and radicalized.
Mother doesn’t want anything to do with son anymore
According to a New York Times report, the mother of Salman Rushdie’s alleged abuser does not want to support her son. “I don’t want anything to do with him,” the 24-year-old’s mother told the newspaper, according to an article published on Wednesday.
So the newspaper had spoken to the woman in the US state of New Jersey on the street in front of her house. Her mother was even quoted as saying that she also had nothing to say to her son. However, she confirmed that Matar returned from a trip to the Middle East in 2018 with a changed personality and increasingly focused on the Islamic faith.
Anglo-Indian author Rushdie was attacked by a man at an event in upstate New York on Friday and has been hospitalized with serious injuries since. Rushdie has been persecuted by religious zealots for decades. because of the novel
(APA/Loop/dpa)