MAYVILLE, New York –
The man charged in the Salman Rushdie stabbing pleaded not guilty Saturday to attempted murder and assault charges in what a prosecutor called a “pre-planned” crime, as the renowned author of “The Satanic Verses” remained hospitalized with serious injury.
An attorney for Hadi Matar pleaded guilty on his behalf during an arraignment in western New York. The suspect appeared in court wearing a black and white jumpsuit and a white face mask, with his hands handcuffed in front of him.
A judge ordered him held without bail after being told by District Attorney Jason Schmidt that Matar took steps to deliberately position himself to harm Rushdie, getting an early pass to the event the author was speaking at and arriving a day early with a fake ID.
“This was a targeted, unprovoked, pre-planned attack on Mr. Rushdie,” Schmidt said.
Public defender Nathaniel Barone complained that authorities had taken too long to bring Matar before a judge while leaving him “hooked to a bench at state police headquarters.”
“You have that constitutional right to be presumed innocent,” Barone added.
Matar, 24, is accused of attacking Rushdie on Friday as the author was speaking at a conference at the Chautauqua Institute, a nonprofit retirement and educational center.
Rushdie, 75, suffered liver damage and severed nerves in his arm and eye, and was on a ventilator and unable to speak, his agent Andrew Wylie said Friday night. Rushdie would likely lose the injured eye.
The attack was met with shock and outrage from much of the world, along with tributes and praise for the award-winning author who for more than 30 years has faced death threats for “The Satanic Verses.”
Authors, activists, and government officials cited Rushdie’s courage for his longstanding defense of free speech despite risks to his own safety. Writer and old friend Ian McEwan called rushdie “an inspiring advocate for persecuted writers and journalists around the world”, and actor and author Kal Penn cited him as a role model “for a whole generation of artists, especially so many of us in the South Asian diaspora towards whom he has shown incredible warmth.”
United States President Joe Biden said Saturday in a statement that he and first lady Jill Biden were “shocked and saddened” by the attack.
“Salman Rushdie, with his vision of humanity, with his unrivaled sense of history, with his refusal to be intimidated or silenced, represents essential and universal ideals,” the statement read. “Truth. Courage. Resilience. The ability to share ideas without fear. These are the building blocks of any free and open society.”
Rushdie, a native of India who has since lived in Britain and the US, is known for his surreal and satirical prose style, beginning with his 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel Midnight’s Children. in which he harshly criticized the then Prime Minister of India. Indira Gandhi.
“The Satanic Verses” received death threats after its publication in 1988, and many Muslims considered a dream sequence based on the life of the Prophet Muhammad blasphemous, among other objections. Rushdie’s book had already been banned and burned in India, Pakistan and elsewhere before Iran’s Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death in 1989.
Khomeini died that same year, but the fatwa is still in force. Iran’s current supreme leader, Khamenei, never issued a fatwa of his own withdrawing the edict, though Iran in recent years has not targeted the writer.
Investigators were working to determine if the assailant, born a decade after the publication of “The Satanic Verses,” acted alone.
District Attorney Schmidt alluded to the fatwa as a potential reason to argue against bail.
“Even if this court were to set bail at $1 million, we run the risk that bail may not be posted,” Schmidt said.
“Your resources don’t matter to me. We understand that the agenda that was carried out yesterday is something that was adopted and sanctioned by larger groups and organizations far beyond the jurisdictional boundaries of Chautauqua County,” the prosecutor said.
Authorities said Matar is from Fairview, New Jersey. He was born in the United States to Lebanese parents who emigrated from Yaroun, in southern Lebanon, the village’s mayor, Ali Tehfe, told The Associated Press.
Flags of the Iranian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah and portraits of leader Hassan Nasrallah, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his late predecessor Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleimani are visible throughout the village, which also has a small Christian population. .
Journalists who visited the town on Saturday were asked to leave. Hezbollah spokesmen did not respond to questions about Matar and the attack.
Iran’s theocratic government and its state media did not assign any motive for the attack. In Tehran, some Iranians interviewed by the AP praised the attack on a perpetrator they believe tarnishes the Islamic faith, while others worry it further isolates the country from him.
An AP reporter saw the attacker stab or punch Rushdie 10 to 15 times. Dr. Martin Haskell, a doctor who was among those rushing to help, described Rushdie’s injuries as “serious but recoverable”.
The event’s moderator, Henry Reese, 73, suffered a facial injury and was treated and released from a hospital, police said. He and Rushdie had planned to talk about the United States as a refuge for writers and other artists in exile.
A state trooper and a county sheriff’s deputy were assigned to Rushdie’s conference, and state police said the trooper made the arrest. But later, some longtime visitors to the center questioned why there wasn’t tighter security given the threats against Rushdie and a more than $3 million bounty on his head.
The stabbing reverberated from the quiet town of Chautauqua to the United Nations, which issued a statement expressing the horror of Secretary General Antonio Guterres and emphasizing that freedom of expression and opinion should not be met with violence.
Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
After the publication of “The Satanic Verses”, often violent protests broke out across the Muslim world against Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim family and long identified as a non-believer, once calling himself ” hard-line atheist”.
At least 45 people were killed in riots over the book, including 12 people in Rushdie’s hometown of Mumbai. In 1991, a Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death and an Italian translator survived a knife attack. In 1993, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times and survived.
The death threats and reward drove Rushdie into hiding under a British government protection program, which included a 24-hour armed guard. Rushdie emerged from nine years of seclusion and cautiously resumed more public appearances, keeping his open criticism of religious extremism in general.
In 2012, Rushdie published a memoir on the fatwa entitled “Joseph Anton”, the pseudonym Rushdie used while in hiding. He said during a talk in New York that year that terrorism was really the art of fear.
“The only way you can beat him is by deciding not to be afraid,” he said.
The Chautauqua Institution, about 55 miles (89 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo in a rural corner of New York, has served for more than a century as a place of reflection and spiritual guidance. Visitors don’t go through metal detectors or baggage checks, and most people leave the doors of their century-old cabins open at night.
The center is known for its summer conference series, where Rushdie has spoken before.
At a Friday night vigil, a few hundred residents and visitors gathered to pray, listen to music and observe a long moment of silence.
“Hate cannot win,” one man yelled.
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Italy reported from New York. Associated Press writer Kareem Chehayeb contributed to this report from Beirut.