JAILHOUSE INTERVIEW

Alleged Rushdie Attacker Admits He Only Read ‘a Couple Pages’ of Controversial Novel

“When I heard he survived, I was surprised, I guess,” Hadi Matar told the New York Post from jail.

The man accused of stabbing author Salman Rushdie admitted in a jailhouse interview that he has only read “a couple pages” of Rushdie’s controversial novel. The ambush during a literary event in New York left Rushdie with a damaged liver and severed nerves in an arm and an eye. In an interview with the New York Post from behind bars, Hadi Matar said he was surprised that Rushdie survived. He wouldn’t say if he carried out the attack because of Iranian religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s call for Rushdie’s death in 1989 over The Satanic Verses. “I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person,” 24-year-old Matar, who was not yet born when The Satanic Verses was published, said of Rushdie. Meanwhile, Henry Reese, who was interviewing Rushdie when the attack occurred, spoke for the first time to BBC News. Nursing a serious eye injury, he was at a loss to describe what happened. “Our concern is for Salman,” he said.