(Title repeat)
by Tyler Clifford
MALVILLE, New York, Aug 18 (Reuters) – The man suspected of stabbing novelist Salman Rushdie last week in western New York was to be formally indicted by a grand jury on Thursday.
Hadi Matar, 24, is accused of having attacked the author of “Satanic Verses” during a conference organized by the Chautauqua Institution.
He was scheduled to appear before a grand jury at 1:00 p.m. local time (5:00 p.m. GMT), Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt’s office said in an email.
Last Saturday, in county court, he pleaded not guilty to the charges of attempted murder and assault.
The attack came 33 years after the fatwa (religious decree) issued by Ayatollah Khomeini calling on Muslims to assassinate Salman Rushdie, a few months after the publication of the “Satanic Verses”, a book which some Muslims claim contains blasphemous passages on Islam.
In 1998, the Iranian government distanced itself from the fatwa, saying the threat was no longer valid, but in 2019 Twitter suspended Ayatollah Khamenei’s account following a tweet claiming the fatwa was instead “irrevocable.”
In an interview published by the New York Post on Wednesday, Matar said he had respect for Ayatollah Khomeini, but did not indicate whether his action was inspired by the fatwa pronounced by the former supreme leader of the Iranian Revolution. He also explained that he only read “a few pages” of “Satanic Verses” and watched videos of the author on YouTube.
The Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs on Monday denied any involvement in the attack, condemned by many heads of state and government around the world.
American investigators currently assume that Matar, a Shia of Lebanese origin born in California, acted alone.
(Report Tyler Clifford Mayville, NY, with Brendan O’Brien Chicago; French version Federica Mileo, told by Marc Angrand)