CHAUTAUQUA COUNTY PRISON/via Portal
What Salman Rushdie’s attacker Hadi Matar said, interviewed from prison (Hadi Matar August 12, 2022 by Chautauqua County Jail/Handout via Portal)
INTERNATIONAL – This is an unexpected interview, to say the least. The American accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie spoke to the New York Post from prison for an interview revealed Wednesday, August 17.
When the New York Post states that the interview took place via video conference and in the presence of Hadi Matar’s lawyers, the American side does not indicate whether the authorities have approved this interview or not.
Hadi Matar, 24, did not say if he was inspired by the fatwa issued by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989, calling for the death of the author of the “Satanic Verses,” who was seen as blasphemous.
“I appreciate the ayatollah. I think he’s a remarkable person. That’s all I would say,” he assured the New York tabloid, which wrote that Hadi Matar’s lawyers advised him not to speak out on the subject. Hadi Matar told the newspaper he had read “a few pages” of Salman Rushdie’s novel.
New appearance is coming
He also said he was “surprised” that the author survived the attack on Friday at a conference in upstate New York. “When I heard he survived, I was surprised,” Hadi Matar told the New York Post, which said he contacted him in prison. The suspect, arrested immediately after the attack, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder on Saturday and is due to appear in court again on Friday.
The 75-year-old British author, who was stabbed a dozen times and evacuated to a hospital by helicopter, was briefly put on a ventilator before his condition improved. “The road to recovery has begun,” his agent said on Sunday.
“I don’t like him, I really don’t like him”
“I don’t like this person. I don’t think he’s a good man,” the suspect told the New York Post of the intellectual. “I don’t like him, I really don’t like him. “He is someone who has attacked Islam,” he added. After watching videos of the author on YouTube, he found him “hypocritical,” he continued.
He said he has no contact with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and learned of Salman Rushdie’s presence at a conference at a cultural center in Chautauqua, New York, via Twitter.
Originally from upstate New Jersey, he told American media he took a bus to the city of Buffalo, then a Lyft — competitors of Uber and taxis — to get to Chautauqua. “I wasn’t doing anything special, just walking around,” he said, “I was just outside the whole time.” When Salman Rushdie took the stage in an amphitheater, the man rushed onto the stage before stabbing him multiple times, including in the neck and abdomen.
Hadi Matar has returned “changed” and more religious from a 2018 trip to Lebanon, his family’s country of origin, his mother told the Chron website on Monday.
See also on The HuffPost: An Iranian official lashed out in the middle of the inauguration
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