Attacker who wounded writer Salman Rushdie given a 25-year sentence.

The individual who attacked and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie during an event at a Western New York arts center in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday, according to the district attorney, for an incident that also injured a second man.

Rushdie, 77, has received death threats since the release of his book “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who was Iran’s supreme leader at the time, condemned as blasphemous, resulting in a demand for Rushdie’s death, a decree referred to as a fatwa.

Hadi Matar, 27, a citizen of the U.S. from Fairview, New Jersey, was convicted of assaulting the author in Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, this past February. He was subject to a maximum penalty of 25 years in prison for the attempted murder charge.

A video of the attack depicts Matar sprinting onto the Chautauqua Institution’s stage while Rushdie was being introduced to the crowd for a discussion on protecting writers from danger. A portion of the video was presented to the jury throughout the seven days of testimony.

“He’s traumatized. He has nightmares about what he experienced,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt said after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered. “Obviously this is a major setback for an individual that was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa.”

Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a nonprofit supporting exiled writers, was also injured in the attack. That morning, he was leading the discussion with Rushdie. Schmidt stated that Matar received a 25-year prison sentence for the second degree attempted murder charge related to the assault on Rushdie and seven years for a second degree assault charge concerning the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will occur simultaneously.

Rushdie, an atheist raised in a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, was repeatedly stabbed in the head, neck, torso, and left hand. The assault left him blind in his right eye and harmed his liver and intestines, necessitating urgent surgery and several months of rehabilitation.

Matar did not give testimony during his trial. His defense attorneys informed the jurors that the prosecution had not demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt the required criminal intent to kill for a conviction of attempted murder and contended that he ought to have faced charges for assault.

Matar’s lawyer Nathaniel Barone stated that his client intends to submit an appeal.

Matar is also facing federal charges filed by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office located in Western New York, alleging that he tried to murder Rushdie as a terrorist act. Prosecutors allege that he offered material assistance to Hezbollah, the militant group in Lebanon that has been labeled a terrorist organization by the U.S. Matar is set to confront those allegations in a different trial in Buffalo.