A man charged with stabbing to death author Salman Rushdie in 2022 rejected a plea deal Tuesday that would have reduced his state prison sentence but put him on federal terrorism charges, the suspect’s lawyer said.
Hadi Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the attack on Rushdie, accused of stabbing the renowned author a dozen times onstage as he was about to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York, leaving him blind.
Mr. Matar’s lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, confirmed that Mr. Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, rejected the agreement on Tuesday in Mayville, New York.
The deal would have reduced Matar’s maximum state prison sentence from 25 years to 20 years in exchange for pleading guilty to attempted murder in Chautauqua County. He would also have had to plead guilty to a federal charge of conspiring to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization, which could have added another 20 years to his sentence, his lawyers said.
Rushdie, who detailed the attack and his recovery in his memoir, had been in hiding for years since 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa calling for his death over his novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. He reemerged in public in the late 1990s and has traveled freely for the past two decades.
Matar was born in the United States but has dual citizenship with Lebanon, where his parents are from, and his mother said her son had become withdrawn and moody since visiting his father in Lebanon in 2018.
In his memoir, Rushdie wrote that he had been about to give a speech at the amphitheater about the importance of protecting writers from harm when he saw a man running towards him. The writer is on the witness list for Matar’s upcoming trial.
A representative for Rushdie did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
