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Europe

At least 12 injured in knife attack at Hamburg train station: emergency services

2025-05-24

[GEO.TV] A knife attack at the main station in the German city of Hamburg left at least 12 people injured with some of them in a life-threatening condition, local emergency services said.

"According to initial information, a person injured several people with a knife at the main train station," Hamburg police said in a post on X.

"The suspect was apprehended by the responding forces."

A front man for the Hamburg fire department told AFP that 12 people had been injured in the attack.

Among them were "six people with life-threatening injuries", the front man said.

Some of the victims were being treated in trains, according to the German daily Bild.

Germany has been rocked by a series of ~~violent~~ mostly peaceful attacks in recent months.

On Sunday, four people were maimed in a stabbing at a bar in the city of Bielefeld.

The investigation into the attack had been handed over to federal prosecutors after the suspect in the attack told the coppers who arrested him that he had murderous Moslem beliefs.

The Times of Israel adds:

German police on Friday said they had arrested a woman after at least 17 people were maimed in a knife attack at the main station in the northern city of Hamburg.

Some of the victims sustained life-threatening injuries in the stabbing, which took place in the middle of the city’s evening rush hour, emergency services said.

The suspect, a 39-year-old German woman,

…which does not tell us whether she was Moslem, nuts, or both…

was arrested at the scene by law enforcement, a Hamburg police front man said said.

Officers "approached her, and the woman allowed herself to be arrested without resistance," Florian Abbenseth told journalists in comments carried by public broadcaster ARD.

"We have no evidence so far that the woman may had a political motive," Abbenseth said.

"Rather, we have information based on which we now want to investigate whether she may have been experiencing a psychological emergency."

The suspect was thought to have "acted alone," Hamburg police said in a post on X.

Four of them had suffered life-threatening injuries, the front man said, revising down an initial figure.

A previous statement by the fire department said six people were in a life-threatening condition.

Among the 17 victims were six severely injured people and seven people with light injuries, the front man for the fire department said.

The attack was reported by German media to have taken place just after 6:00 p.m. local time on one of the platforms in front of a standing train.

The suspect was thought to have turned "against passengers" at the station, a spokeswoman for the Hanover federal police directorate, which also covers Hamburg, told AFP.

Courtesy of Skidmark, more from Breitbart:

Twelve people are injured and three of them are in “mortal danger” after a mass stabbing at Germany’s Hamburg Central railway station.

Update 2100 — Four are in critical condition

A clearer picture of today’s mass stabbing in Germany is developing, with Die Welt reporting the number of known injured has risen to four in critical condition. A further six are seriously injured and seven more suffering light wounds. 17 in all were injured.

The attack is the second mass stabbing in Germany in a matter of days. As previously reported, a stabbing in the early hours of Sunday morning in Bielefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia, allegedly by a Syrian migrant was days later classified as a possible terror attack after Islamist literature was found on the attacker and at his home. As well as using a knife, the man is alleged to have wielded a spear and a bottle of petrol.

More from Breitbart about the Bielefeld attack:

A Syrian migrant, identified 35-year-old as Mahmoud Mhemed, was arrested on Monday by police on attempted murder charges in relation to a mass stabbing in Bielefeld in North Rhine-Westphalia. Five people were injured, and four of them seriously: the German Justice minister revealed they “barely escaped with their lives”.

The bar where the attack took place said in a social media post that one of those “critically injured” men had been a member of the public who had bravely fought the knifeman to end the attack. They said: “Had it not been for him, things would probably have been even worse”.

Now the investigation into that attack has been taken over by the Federal Prosecutor on suspicion of a religious terrorism motive. Per a report by Germany’s Die Welt, they believe they have found evidence for Islamism, that the suspect had an interest in the Islamic State, and had been in contact with a known Islamist fundamentalist.

It is stated the attack, which took place at a bar in the city, saw football fans attacked by a man wielding a knife and a home made spear, being a knife tied to a pole. A group of patrons fought back, causing the suspect to flee. As previously reported, the man dropped a bag containing “multiple knives, a liquid that smelled of gasoline, and personal documents indicating Syrian nationality”.

Zeit states a spokesman for the Federal Prosecutor, which has specialist counter-terror investigators and takes suspected terror cases over from local non-specialised prosecutors, who said the mass stabbing is being treated as an attack on Germany’s liberal democratic order and that at the time of the suspect’s arrest “a document was found on him that suggests the crime may have been religiously motivated.”

Further, images concerning Hezbollah and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) are said to have been found at the suspect’s apartment.

Suspect Mhemed entered Europe through the territory of Turkey and was granted temporary refugee status by the German Migration Office in 2023. Earlier reports that he had no police record have been superseded, Focus reports, noting he had previously been investigated for “politically motivated crime” .

He was arrested on Monday after leading police on a 100 mile chase through Germany, taking several trains and other public transport from Bielefeld to Essen and to other towns beyond, finally being found in an apartment of a relative in Heiligenhaus.

Link

Home Front: WoT

Assailant who stabbed author Salman Rushdie sentenced to 25 years

2025-05-17

[IsraelTimes] The man who stabbed and partially blinded novelist Salman Rushdie onstage at a Western New York arts institute in 2022 was sentenced to 25 years in prison on Friday for an attack that also maimed a second man, the district attorney says.

Rushdie, 77, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel "The Satanic Verses," which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie’s death, an edict known as a fatwa.

Hadi Matar, 27, a US citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was found guilty in February of attacking the author in the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York. He faced a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison on the attempted murder charge.

Video that captured the assault shows Matar rushing the Chautauqua Institution’s stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Some of the video was shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony.

"He’s traumatized. He has nightmares about what he experienced," Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt says after the sentencing hearing, referring to what Rushdie suffered.

"Obviously this is a major setback for an individual who was starting to emerge in his very later years of life into society after going into hiding after the fatwa."

Also hurt in the attack was Henry Reese, co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a nonprofit that helps exiled writers. He was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.

Schmidt said Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the second degree attempted murder charge stemming from the attack against Rushdie and seven years for a second degree assault charged for the stabbing of Reese. The sentences will run concurrently.

Rushdie, an atheist born into a Moslem Kashmiri family in India, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand. The attack blinded his right eye and damaged his liver and intestines, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.

Matar did not testify at his trial. His defense lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault.

Matar’s attorney Nathaniel Barone said his client will file an appeal.

"I know if he had the opportunity, he would not be sitting where he’s sitting today. And if he could change things, he would," Barone said.

Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in Western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism. Prosecutors accuse him of providing material support to Leb
Leb

...Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects....
’s bully boy Hezbollah group, which the US. has designated as a terrorist organization.

Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.

More from the Times of Israel:

Hadi Matar, 27, stood quietly as the judge pronounced the sentence. He did not deny attacking Rushdie, and when he was invited to address the court before being sentenced, Matar got in a few last insults at the writer. He said he believed in freedom of speech but called Rushdie “a hypocrite.”

“Salman Rushdie wants to disrespect other people,” said Matar, clad in white-striped jail clothing and wearing handcuffs. “He wants to be a bully, he wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.”

Video of the assault, captured by the venue’s cameras and played at trial, shows Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife. As the audience gasps and screams, Rushdie is seen raising his arms and rising from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.

A jury found Matar guilty of attempted murder and assault in February after deliberating for less than two hours.

Judge David Foley told Matar that he thought it was notable that he had chosen to try and kill Rushdie at the Chautauqua Institution, a summer retreat that prides itself on the free exchange of ideas.

“We all have the right to have our own ideals; we all have the right to carry them,” Foley said. “But when you interfere with someone else’s ability to do that by committing a violent act, in the United States of America, that has to be an answerable crime.”

Matar’s lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, had asked the judge for a sentence of around 12 years, citing his lack of a previous criminal record.

Matar next faces a US federal trial on terrorism-related charges. While the first, state-level trial focused mostly on the details of the knife attack itself, the next one is expected to delve into the more complicated issue of motive. He has pleaded not guilty. If convicted of the federal charges, Matar faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.

Authorities said Matar, a dual American-Lebanese citizen, was attempting to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or Islamic legal ruling, when he traveled from his home in Fairview, New Jersey, to target Rushdie at the summer retreat about 70 miles (110 kilometers) southwest of Buffalo.

Matar believed the fatwa that called for Rushdie’s death, first issued by Iran’s then-Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, was backed by Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s slain chief Hassan Nasrallah, according to US federal prosecutors.

Khomeini had issued the fatwa after the publication of Rushdie’s novel, “The Satanic Verses,” which some Muslims consider blasphemous. Rushdie spent years in hiding, but after Iran announced it would not enforce the decree, he traveled freely over the past quarter century.

Link

Home Front: WoT

Man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie found guilty of attempted murder

2025-02-22

[IsraelTimes] Hadi Matar has no reaction to the verdict except to mutter ‘Free Palestine’ as he is lead out of court; still faces Federal terrorism charges

A New Jersey man was convicted Friday of attempted murder for stabbing author Salman Rushdie multiple times on a New York lecture stage in 2022.

Jurors, who deliberated for less than two hours, also found Hadi Matar, 27,

...Lebanese-American reared un-Islamicly in New Jersey by a single mother. He went to Hezbollahstan a few years ago to visit his dad and came back primed for Shiite jihad. Despite failing to kill Mr. Rushdie, the government of Iran has awarded the misceant a full quarter acre of farmland to show their appreciation…

guilty of assault for wounding a man who was on stage with Rushdie at the time.

Matar ran onto the stage at the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was about to speak on Aug. 12, 2022, and stabbed him more than a dozen times before a live audience. The attack left the 77-year-old prizewinning novelist blind in one eye.

Rushdie was the key witness during seven days of testimony, describing in graphic detail his life-threatening injuries and long and painful recovery.

Matar, sitting at the defense table, looked down but had no obvious reaction when the jury delivered the verdict. As he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he quietly uttered, "Free Paleostine," echoing comments he has frequently made while entering and leaving the trial.

The judge set sentencing for April 23. Matar could receive up to 25 years in prison.

His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, said Matar was disappointed but also well-prepared for the verdict.

District Attorney Jason Schmidt played a slow-motion video of the attack for the jury Friday during his closing argument, pointing out the assailant as he emerged from the audience, walked up a staircase to the stage and broke into a run toward Rushdie.

"I want you to look at the unprovoked nature of this attack," Schmidt said. "I want you to look at the targeted nature of the attack. There were a lot of people around that day but there was only one person who was targeted."

Assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors have not proved that Matar intended to kill Rushdie. The distinction is important for an attempted-murder conviction.

"You will agree something bad happened to Mr. Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr. Matar’s conscious objective was," Brautigan said. "The testimony you have heard doesn’t establish anything more than a chaotic noisy outburst that occurred that injured Mr. Rushdie."

Matar had with him knives, not a gun or bomb, his attorneys have said previously. In response to testimony that the injuries were life-threatening, they noted that Rushdie’s heart and lungs were uninjured.

Schmidt said while it’s not possible to read Matar’s mind, "It’s foreseeable that if you’re going to stab someone 10 or 15 times about the face and neck, it’s going to result in a fatality."

Rushdie, 77, was the key witness during testimony that began last week. The Booker Prize-winning author told jurors he thought he was dying when a masked stranger ran onto the stage and stabbed and slashed at him until being tackled by bystanders. Rushdie showed jurors his now-blinded right eye, usually hidden behind a darkened eyeglass lens.

Schmidt reminded jurors about the testimony of a trauma surgeon, who said Rushdie’s injuries would have been fatal without quick treatment.

He also slowed down the video showing Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife. Rushdie raises his arms and rises from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.

Rushdie is seen flailing on the ground, waving a hand covered in bright red blood. Schmidt freezes on a frame showing Rushdie, his face also bloodied, as he’s surrounded by people.

"We’ve shown you intent," Schmidt said.

The recordings also picked up the gasps and screams from audience members who had been seated to hear Rushdie speak with City of Asylum Pittsburgh founder Henry Reese about keeping writers safe. Reese suffered a gash to his forehead, leading to the assault charge against Matar.

From the witness stand, institution staff, and others who were present on the day of the attack pointed to Matar as the assailant.

Stabbed and slashed more than a dozen times in the head, throat, torso, thigh, and hand, Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center. He detailed his long and painful recovery in his 2024 memoir, "Knife."

Throughout the trial, Matar often took notes with a pen and sometimes laughed or smiled with his defense team during breaks in testimony. His lawyers declined to call any witnesses of their own and Matar did not testify in his defense.

Public Defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar likely would have faced a lesser charge of assault were it not for Rushdie’s celebrity.

"We think that it became an attempted murder because of the notoriety of the alleged victim in the case," Barone told news hounds after testimony concluded Thursday. "That’s been it from the very beginning. It’s been nothing more, nothing less. And it’s for publicity purposes. It’s for self-interest purposes."

A separate federal indictment alleges that Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the terror group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death. Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after the publication of the novel "The Satanic Verses," which some Moslems consider blasphemous.

Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran
Iran

...a theocratic Shiite state divided among the Medes, the Persians, and the (Arab) Elamites. Formerly a fairly civilized nation ruled by a Shah, it became a victim of Islamic revolution in 1979. The nation is today noted for spontaneously taking over other countries' embassies, maintaining whorehouses run by clergymen, involvement in international drug trafficking, and financing sock puppet militias to extend the regime's influence. The word Iran is a cognate form of Aryan. The abbreviation IRGC is the same idea as Stürmabteilung (or SA). The term Supreme Guide is a the modern version form of either Duce or Führer or maybe both. They hate ~~Jews~~ ~~Zionists~~ Jews. Their economy is based on the production of oil and vitriol...
announced that it would not enforce the decree, he had traveled freely over the past quarter century.

A trial on the federal terrorism-related charges will be scheduled in US District Court in Buffalo.

Link

Home Front: WoT

A Critically Important Trial Has Just Begun, and No One Involved Will Speak About Motive

2025-02-07

[PJMedia] When the defendant entered the courtroom, he was dressed respectably in a blue button-down shirt and dark slacks. When his presence was announced, he stood up, said "Good morning," and gave all present a cheery wave. And thus began one of the most important trials of our age, although everyone involved is doing everything possible to ignore all the reasons why it is so important.

Hadi Matar

finally went on trial Tuesday for attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie back in Aug. 2022. There is little, if any, doubt about Matar’s guilt, even though he has pleaded not guilty
"Wudn't me."
, for he stabbed Rushdie multiple times in full view of a shocked crowd at the Chautauqua festival. Matar was supposed to have gone on trial in Jan. 2024, but Rushdie wrote a book about the attack, and Matar’s defense attorney, public defender Nathaniel Barone, received a delay in the trial so that he could review the book. It’s hard to fathom how what the victim thought about what happened might affect the guilt of his client, but nevertheless, Barone managed to delay the trial for over a year.

Now that it has begun, both Barone and his opposite number, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt, seem curiously intent on preventing any discussion of Matar’s motive. Matar tried to kill the man who, at the time of the stabbing had carried for 33 years the most famous bounty on his head since the days of the Wild West.

It was on Valentine's Day, Feb. 14, 1989, that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called for Rushdie to be killed for supposedly blaspheming against Muhammad in his novel "The Satanic Verses." By 2022, Iran’s bounty on Rushdie’s head was $3 million. Without Khomeini’s death fatwa on Rushdie, Matar wouldn’t have tried to kill him, and there would be no trial. Nevertheless, neither the prosecution nor the defense wants any talk of that as Matar is tried.

Matar himself was upfront about why he stabbed Rushdie. Back in Aug. 2022, he said: "I respect the ayatollah. I think he’s a great person. That’s as far as I will say about that." Of Rushdie, Matar said: "I don’t like the person. I don’t think he’s a very good person. I don’t like him. I don’t like him very much. He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems." Matar isn’t the most articulate person in the world, but what he said was clear enough to establish that he wanted Rushdie dead in accord with Khomeini’s fatwa.

Schmidt, however, insists all that is irrelevant, saying: "Here, I don’t believe we have to get into issues of Mr. Matar’s religious beliefs, his nationality, and his background to prove an attempted murder charge, which is what we’re doing. The allegation is that Mr. Matar stabbed Mr. Rushdie and stabbed Mr. Reese in an unprovoked attack. Therefore, I think we can prove that without getting into matters that give rise to prejudice of our jury pool."

Schmidt added: "From my standpoint, this is a localized event. It’s a stabbing event. It’s fairly straightforward. I don’t really see a need to get into motive evidence, whether that’s applicable or not applicable and what that consists of. I’d like to avoid all of that."

Well, all right, but isn’t examination of motive ordinarily a staple of murder trials? There are numerous reasons for this, including determination of the gravity of the offense, and the likelihood of similar incidents in the future. But Barone is only too happy to leave Matar’s motives out of the trial, as he wanted jurors screened for dislike of Islam. "They’ve talked about the reason why this alleged crime supposedly occurred was because of this book involving Moslems, all that. So it’s kind of like the barn door’s been opened," Barone said, and he wants that barn door closed.

All this is unfolding just days after Salwan Momika, an Iraqi critic of Islam, was murdered in Sweden for burning the Qur’an. The trial of Hadi Matar carries extraordinarily important implications for the future of the freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the West. Will Western countries defend the freedom of speech in connection to criticism of Islam, or abandon it? Hadi Matar blinded Salman Rushdie in one eye and caused permanent damage to one of his arms because of Rushdie’s criticism of Islam, and now at his trial, both attorneys want to pretend that this was some random and inexplicable murder attempt. The implication is that Hadi Matar was right to want Rushdie silenced, and now the attorneys are joining in the silencing.

Link

Olde Tyme Religion

India lift 36-year ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses

2024-11-09

[KhaamaPress] An Indian court has lifted the decades-old ban on the import of Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, as authorities were unable to locate the original order imposing the restriction.

Not a matter of priniciple? Bummer. Lost paperwork sets no precedents. But still, lifting the ban is good thing unless you’re one of the various flavours of totalitarian.

Rushdie’s novel, published in 1988, was banned in India due to the controversies it sparked.

India became the first country to ban the book because of its portrayal of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad, which many Moslems found blasphemous, leading to protests and threats against the British-Indian author.

The ban became the subject of a petition filed in 2019 by an individual named Sandipan Khan, who challenged the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs at the Delhi High Court.

Khan questioned the legality of the 1988 order, which prohibited the book’s import under India’s 1962 Customs Act, claiming it contained alleged blasphemous content.

In his petition, Khan argued that the ban violated the fundamental right to freedom of expression, and he requested the court to allow the book’s import.

According to legal documents, Khan asked the judiciary for a copy of the order that banned the book’s import. However,
it's easy to be generous with someone else's money...
he was informed that the document could not be found.

Records show that the Central Board of Indirect Taxes and Customs requested multiple extensions from May 2019 to May 2024 from the Delhi High Court to locate the document. Eventually, they informed the court that "the text of the order is untraceable and thus cannot be provided."

In the final hearing on the matter this week, the Delhi High Court ruled that "there is no alternative but to assume the non-existence of such a notice."

In the ruling issued on November 5, the court stated that "the petitioner shall be entitled to proceed with actions related to this book as per the law."

This ruling underscores a turning point in freedom of expression in India, as a long-standing ban on a controversial work is lifted, allowing new discourse on sensitive literary content in the country.

Link

Home Front: WoT

Pakistani man with alleged ties to Iran arrested in political assassination plots including Trump

2024-08-07

[JustTheNews] The U.S. Justice Department charged Asif Merchant, 46, a Pak man with alleged ties to the Iranian government with plotting to carry out political liquidations, according to an indictment revealed on Tuesday.

The arrest on July 12 resulted in enhanced security for former President Donald Trump
...The tack in the backside of the Democratic Party...
and certain U.S. government officials who the FBI
FBI

...Formerly one of the world's premier criminal investigation organizations, something for a nation to be proud of. Now it's a political arm of the Deep State oligarchy that is willing to trump up charges, suppress evidence, or take out insurance policies come election time...
reportedly determined were the suspect's targets.

A Justice Department official confirmed the case involving Merchant was the threat that Secret Service was aware of when it became to ramp up Trump's security in the lead up to the Butler, Pa. rally where he was shot.

Federal prosecutors filed the charges in Brooklyn against Merchant, who reportedly traveled to New York City and collaborated with hitmen on the plot.

Merchant is currently in federal custody after getting arrested while allegedly planning to leave the U.S.

The Times of Israel has a photo of the miscreant, and adds:

A Pakistani man with ties to Iran has been arrested for allegedly plotting to assassinate a US official in retaliation for the killing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Qassem Soleimani, the Justice Department said Tuesday.

Federal officials identified Asif Raza Merchant, 46, as a Pakistani citizen who has said he has a wife and children in Iran. He traveled frequently to Iran, Syria and Iraq, the Justice Department said and allegedly sought to hire a hitman to assassinate a politician or a US government official in the United States.

Soleimani, who headed the IRGC’s Quds Force, a US-designated terrorist group, was killed in a US drone strike in Baghdad in January 2020. Iranian officials have repeatedly vowed to take “revenge” for the killing.

Court documents do not identify any of the potential targets, but the case was unsealed just weeks after US officials disclosed that a threat on Donald Trump’s life from Iran prompted additional security in the days before a Pennsylvania rally last month in which Trump was injured by a gunman’s bullet.

FBI Director Christopher Wary said the Pakistani national had “close ties to Iran” and that the alleged murder-for-hire plot was “straight out of the Iranian playbook.”

Asif Merchant traveled to New York in April for the purpose of hiring hitmen, even paying a $5,000 advance to two would-be assassins who were actually undercover law enforcement officers.

The instructions prosecutors say he gave to the men he thought he was hiring were for killings to take place in August or September — after he had left the country.

Merchant was arrested on July 12 as he planned to leave the country.

In August 2022, the United States charged a member of the Revolutionary Guards with plotting to assassinate former US National Security Advisor John Bolton. The Justice Department said Shahram Poursafi, who remains at large, had offered to pay an individual in the United States $300,000 to kill Bolton.

Iran has dismissed the claim that it had plotted to kill Bolton as “fiction.”

Link

Home Front: WoT

Lebanese-American accused of stabbing Rushdie rejects plea deal

2024-07-04

[An Nahar] The man charged with stabbing author Salman Rushdie has rejected a plea deal that would have shortened his state prison term but exposed him to a federal terrorism-related charge, the suspect's lawyer said.

Hadi Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the 2022 attack, in which he is accused of stabbing Rushdie more than a dozen times and blinding him in one eye as the acclaimed writer was onstage, about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

Matar's attorney, Nathaniel Barone, confirmed that Matar, who lived in Fairview, New Jersey, rejected the agreement Tuesday in Mayville, New York.

The agreement would have had Matar plead guilty in Chautauqua County to attempted murder in exchange for a maximum state prison sentence of 20 years, down from 25 years. It would have also required him to plead guilty to a federal charge of attempting to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization, which could result in an additional 20 years, attorneys said.

Rushdie, who detailed the attack and his recovery in a memoir, had spent years in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, in 1989 calling for his death over Rushdie's novel "The Satanic Verses," which some Muslims consider blasphemous. The author reemerged into the public the late 1990s and has traveled freely over the past two decades.

Matar was born in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. His mother has said that her son had become withdrawn and moody after visiting his father in Lebanon in 2018.

Rushdie wrote in his memoir that he saw a man running toward him in the amphitheater, where he was about to speak about the importance of keeping writers safe from harm. The author is on the witness list for Matar's upcoming trial.

Link

-Lurid Crime Tales-

Oberlin College Sues Insurance Companies for Refusing to Reimburse $40 Million Settlement

2023-08-08

[NR] Oberlin College is embarking on another legal battle now that it has finally paid out $36.59 million in damages to a local bakery for falsely accusing the business owners of racism. This time, the college is suing four of its insurance providers after they failed to reimburse the school for the multimillion-dollar judgment in the Gibson Bakery’s case.

After a years long legal battle, Oberlin agreed to pay the massive sum to the bakery in September 2022.

Gibson’s Bakery sued the college in 2017, accusing the school and one of its administrators of hurting its business and libeling it over an incident in which the son of the bakery owner stopped three black Oberlin College students, one of whom was stealing wine bottles from the store, in November 2016.

Students from the school protested the bakery after the arrest, handing out fliers outside the shop telling patrons to shop elsewhere. The fliers also accused the Gibsons of having a long history of racial profiling, citing the November 2016 incident. Witnesses who testified at the trial said Oberlin College Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo participated in the protests, handing out stacks of fliers for others to distribute.
So, they dragged their heels on paying, now the shoe's on the other foot.
Now the college is pursuing legal action against Lexington Insurance Company of New York; United Educators Insurance of Bethesda, Maryland; Mount Hawley Insurance Company of Peoria, Illinois; and StarStone Specialty Insurance Company of Cincinnati.

The school filed the suit in Lorain County Common Pleas Court in April accusing the companies of wrongfully refusing to "to honor promises they made in their respective policies to protect the interests of Oberlin College" and the school’s former vice president and dean of students, Meredith Raimondo.

The college had $25 million in commercial umbrella liability coverage from Lexington and another $10 million from Mount Hawley. The school had an additional $5 million from StarStone and $25 million in overlapping educators legal liability coverage from United Educators, according to the lawsuit.

"These policies were intended to provide seamless coverage for lawsuits like the Gibson litigation," the complaint says. "Unfortunately, the defendant insurers have failed to pay a penny toward the $36,590,572.48 sum that Oberlin paid the Gibson plaintiffs. They also have failed to pay for the full cost of Oberlin’s appeals, which were pursued at the behest of the insurers in order to reduce their collective exposure."

The college claims its insurers said that "some, if not all, of the damages" would be covered.

Link

Down Under

Australian journalist Julian Assange 'taken hostage by US', action at UN may follow. PM Albanese's record stained forever if he dies, Tribunal hears

2023-03-04

[LettersFromAustralia] Lawyers push US Ambassador, Albanese, to talk Assange with US President Joe Biden ahead of Quad visit. Senior bureaucrats 'are complicit' in Wikileaks publisher's torture

Link

Good Morning

2023-02-22

Missouri teacher finds loaded
gun in five-year-old's bag: reports

Wednesday February 22nd, 2023

FPM MP says Hezbollah has ended MoU with his movement

SusanHartShelleyFabaresBarbaraEden1964

Palestinians worried about public apathy to security prisoners' protest		Iranian foundation offers land to Salman Rushdie's attacker - state media
A native of Chechnya was denied the challenge of a judge in the case of justifying terrorism		HTS Steals Quake-Relief Aid, Monopolizes Markets In Syria%u2019s Northwest
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Syria-Lebanon-Iran

Iranian foundation offers land to Salman Rushdie's attacker - state media

2023-02-22

[Jpost] '1,000 square meters of agricultural land'
1 acre = 4046.86 square meters so, about 1/4 acre.
No bigger than some house lots.
An Iranian foundation has praised the man who attacked novelist Salman Rushdie last year, leaving him severely injured, and said it will reward him with 1,000 square meters of agricultural land, state TV reported on Tuesday through its Telegram channel.

Rushdie, 75, lost an eye and the use of one hand following the assault by Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old Shi'ite Muslim American from New Jersey, on the stage of a literary event held near Lake Erie in western New York in August.

"We sincerely thank the brave action of the young American who made Muslims happy by blinding one of Rushdie's eyes and disabling one of his hands," said Mohammad Esmail Zarei, secretary of the Foundation to Implement Imam Khomeini's Fatwas.

"Rushdie is now no more than living dead and to honor this brave action, about 1,000 square meters of agricultural land will be donated to the person or any of his legal representatives," Zarei added.

FORMER IRANIAN AYATOLLAH ISSUED BOUNTY ON RUSHDIE
The attack came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader called on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie a few months after The Satanic Verses was published. Some Muslims saw passages in the novel about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous.

The Jerusalem Post first reported on the pro-Iranian regime professor at Oberlin College in Ohio, Mohammad Jafar Mahallati, who endorsed the edict to kill Rushdie at the time.

Lawdan Bazargan, an Iranian-American activist seeking to secure Mahallati's dismissal, told the Post that "I consider Mahallati and US universities such as Oberlin College, Princeton, and Columbia responsible for the stabbing of Salman Rushdie. These elite universities hire the Islamic Regime of Iran's Ambassadors, call them scholars, and give them access to American students to brainwash them and spread radical Shi'a Islamic values. Mahallati had defended the bounty against Salman Rushdie as a non-disputable fact among Muslims."

She added that "In the past 30 years, Mahallati has shared the same ideas with his students in the classrooms, and they shared them with their circle of friends and colleagues, spreading hate and intolerance all over the US. Besides, Mahallati is closely connected with Islamic Centers and mosques in the US, spreading his hateful message through those platforms, radicalizing young people such as Hadi Matar. US universities such as Oberlin are responsible for this terrorist attack because they created a platform for the ideologues such as Mahallati to do the dirty work of Iran's Islamic regime. How many more people must be injured or killed until Oberlin college fire Mahallati and Princeton fire Mousavian?"

Sheina Vojoudi, an associate fellow for the Gold Institute for International Strategy, told the Post that "It’s not surprising that the top state-sponsor of terrorism, which has hijacked an ancient civilization and turned it to the source of funding for terrorism, rewards a terrorist."

The US State Department has classified the Iranian regime as the worst international state-sponsor of terrorism.

Vojoud added that "The Islamic Republic has been rewarding terror entities like Fatemiyoun, Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi, Hamas and Hezbollah since Khomeini’s Islamic revolution. The members of these terror organizations, especially Fatemiyoun, are rewarded with houses and monthly salaries in dollars, not in the Iranian rial. I’ve tried to draw the world’s attention to Fatemiyoun, Hezbollah and Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi’s role in killing the Iranian protesters for the economic benefits."

"It’s time for the European Union to take this matter in consideration and finally list Iranäs Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization."

Rushdie, who was born in India to a Muslim Kashmiri family, has lived with a bounty on his head and spent nine years in hiding under British police protection.

Although Iran's pro-reform government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the edict in the late 1990s, the multimillion-dollar bounty hanging over Rushdie's head kept growing and was never lifted.

The man accused of attacking the novelist has pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault charges.

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Home Front: WoT

Rushdie says 'very difficult' to write after stabbing

2023-02-08

[Rudaw] British author Salman Rushdie said he finds it "very difficult" to write after being stabbed last year, in an interview published Monday ahead of the release of his new novel "Victory City."

Hadi Matar, a 24-year-old from New Jersey with roots in Lebanon, was arrested immediately after the attack and pleaded not guilty to assault charges.

Rushdie, whose "epic tale" of a 14th-century woman who defies a patriarchal world to rule a city hits US shelves on Tuesday, said the attack had scarred him mentally.

"There is such a thing as PTSD you know," the 75-year-old told the New Yorker magazine in his first interview since the August 12 stabbing at a conference in Chautauqua in upstate New York.

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