Rushdie’s attacker had ‘Shia’ views
AUTHOR Salman Rushdie’s alleged assailant Hadi Matar sympathised with an Iranian military organisation and sith extremists, according to media reports citing law enforcement sources.
During a preliminary review, Matar’s social media accounts showed he is “sympathetic to Shia extremism and Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) causes”, NBC News said, quoting a law enforcement source.
Matar stabbed Rushdie on August 13 in a New York education and spiritual centre as he was preparing to participate in a discussion on creative freedom in the US.
Rushdie was flown by a helicopter from the centre in Chautauqua to a hospital in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he was put on a ventilator and underwent surgery for wounds to his neck, liver, arm and eye. The Indian-born author’s son Zafar said he had recovered enough to speak and was his “feisty and defiant” self.
The killing of IRGC Major-general Qasem Soleimani by a US drone strike near Baghdad may have also been an impulse for the attack. Photos of Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-muhandis, the leader of Iraq’s pro-iranian militia movement who was also killed in the 2020 drone attack, were found on Matar’s phone. IRGC is a branch of the Iranian military that operates domestically and internationally, including in Iraq and Syria.
Indicating Matar’s deep sympathies for the pro-iranian Shia terrorist groups, police found a fake New Jersey driver’s licence with the name “Hassan Mughniyah”, but with Matar’s picture.
Ayatollah Khomeini, the late Iranian Supreme leader, put a death fatwah on Rushdie in 1989 because of his novel, Satanic Verses, which Khomeini considered blasphemous, and Iranian groups have put a bounty of over $3 million (about R50m) on him.
The adviser to the Iranian negotiators for a nuclear deal, Seyed Mohammad Marandi, tweeted: “I won’t be shedding tears for a writer who spouts endless hatred and contempt for Muslims and Islam. A pawn of empire who poses as a post-colonial novelist.”
But trying to distance his regime from Matar, he also asserted it was “odd” that “this happens” as the US, the other permanent members of the UN Security Council, Germany and the EU were near a potential deal to revive the agreement that former US president Donald Trump had junked to limit Iran’s nuclear programme in return for lifting sanctions against it.
Matar’s mother, Silvana Fardos, indicated he probably got radicalised during a trip to the Middle East. Fardos said that when he returned from a visit to Lebanon to visit his father, the once outgoing and popular Matar was a “moody introvert” and locked himself in the basement, refusing to let them in.
Meanwhile, Iran’s Foreign Ministry said yesterday: “There is no connection between Iran and the perpetrator. Rushdie himself is responsible for the attack.” |