Hadi Matar, 24, arrived for his court appearance where he pleaded “not guilty” to the attack on Salman Rushdie. Photo: AP
A normal, outgoing young American. A “loving and outgoing” son with life plans. According to his mother, it was Hadi Matar, the 24-year-old man accused of carrying out the brutal attack on Salman Rushdie last Friday, until a trip he took in 2018 to visit his father in Lebanon.
After spending 28 days in the countryside, the gregarious boy she met has returned transformed into a completely different person: quiet and introverted, he refused contact with his family and moved to the basement of the woman’s house in New Jersey. He even cooked his meals and started living at night to sleep during the day.
“I was hoping that he would come back motivated to finish his studies, that he would take a degree and a job. But he came back and locked himself in the cellar. He had changed a lot, neither me nor his sisters has been talking to us for months“said Matar’s mother, Silvana Fardos, a The DailyMail.
Images of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (left) and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, responsible for issuing the fatwa against the writer Salman Rushdie, are visible on the streets of Yaroun. Photo: AFP
“I couldn’t tell you much about his life after, because he’s been keeping me away from 2018. If I came, he would say hello to me at times, at other times he would ignore me and leave,” he added.
Fardos also claimed that the young man began to be more religious and criticized him for not introducing him to Islam at an early age. “I have not pushed any of my children to religion, nor have I forced my son to do anything. I don’t know anyone in Iran, my whole family is here,” explained the woman, who she has he repudiated the actions of his sonsaying he is “responsible for his actions”.
It is unclear what activities Matar did during his trip to the Middle East. Both the young man’s mother and father are Lebanese, but he was born in the United States. After divorcing Fardos in 2004, his father, Hassan Matar, returned to Lebanon and settled in Yaroun, near the border with Israel.
According to Associated PressFlags of the Shiite Hezbollah group can be seen on the streets of Yaroun, as well as images of Iranian leaders, including Ayatollah Khomeini and General Qassem Soleimani, leader of the Revolutionary Guards, assassinated by the United States in 2020.
The house in Yaroun, Lebanon, where Hassan Matar, the father of the attacker on Salman Rushdie, lives. Photo: Reuters
Saturday the agency Reuters reported that Matar’s father is currently locked up in the house and refuses to talk to anyone.
What the police say about Hadi Matar
According to the police, the reason for the attack is still unclear. After the search of the basement where the young man lived, the authorities took a computer, books and some knives.
The NBC network, for its part, cited police sources as saying that Matar’s social media posts were discovered with sympathies towards Hezbollah and the Revolutionary Guard Iranian, but all that activity has already been eliminated.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani on Saturday denied that Tehran had any connection with the striker, unusually blaming Rushdie himself for what happened.
Hadi Matar, 24, was arrested after the attack and is being held in a New York prison. Photo: AP
In the Iranian press, however, the attack was celebrated. Although the fatwa launched by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1988 against the author for his novel The Satanic Verses has never been canceled, the author himself considered it old, and a few weeks before the attack said he led a “relatively normal” life.“.
The truth is that as early as 2001 the writer had complained about the immense security operations that were being organized in each of his presentations. At the Prague Writers’ Festival that year, he told reporters: “Being here and finding a big security operation around me was really a little embarrassing.”
Over the years, these cures often relax, even with a a three million dollar reward that never stopped.
For the witnesses in the room, the assailant acted alone and very easily got to where the perpetrator was. “There was only one attacker,” said Elisabeth Healey, 75 The New York Times.
While John Bulette, 85, said the striker was able to act because there was a big security bug. “That someone can get that close without any kind of intervention is terrifying,” she said.
Clarin editorial staff with information from agencies
Source: Clarin
