The man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie said he respected Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (the leader of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution) but stopped short of saying he was inspired by the former Iranian supreme leader’s fatwa, according to an interview Wednesday in New York Post.

Hadi Matar also said he had “only read a few pages” of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and that a tweet announcing the author’s winter visit to the Chautauqua Institute prompted him to go there as well, Reuters and Agerpres reported. .

Last Friday, 75-year-old Salman Rushdie was scheduled to hold a conference on creative freedom in New York’s West Side when police said 24-year-old Hadi Matar ran on stage and punched the Indian-born writer.

Rushdie lived under the threat of a bounty on his head after the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1988 prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling on Muslims to kill him.

“Rushdie attacked Islam”

“I respect the Ayatollah. I think he was a wonderful person. That’s all I’m going to say on the subject,” Matar told the New York Post in a video interview from the Chautauqua County Jail.

“I don’t really like him,” Matar said of Rushdie. “He is the one who attacked Islam, attacked its beliefs, its belief systems,” he said, adding that he had watched the writer’s YouTube videos.

According to the newspaper, Matar denied that he was in contact with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the elite army of the Iranian regime.

His official attorney said he was unaware that the New York Post had contacted his client for an interview.

“I have not authorized any outside source, with or without government assistance, to contact my client,” attorney Nathaniel Barone told Reuters.

Hadi Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault in court on Saturday. A grand jury is expected to hand down an indictment this week that will formally list the charges against him.

Read on this topic:

• Iran’s first official reaction to the attack on Salman Rushdie: “Only he is to blame. Nobody can blame Tehran”
• VIDEO Salman Rushdie, the author of “The Satanic Verses”, was stabbed on stage in New York / The writer was operated on for several hours, and his agent says that “the news is bad” / Who is the attacker
• What is “Fatwa” and how it sentenced Salman Rushdie to solitary confinement
• What we need to know about Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses / What made radical Muslims angry
• Iranian media rejoices at the attack on Salman Rushdie: “We kiss the hand of the one who tore the throat of the enemy of God”
• The writer is on a ventilator / His agent says he is likely to lose an eye and has been stabbed in the liver
• The criminal did not utter a single word in front of the judge / The writer was removed from the ventilator, “they talk and joke”
• After the first joys after the attack on Salman Rushdie, the Iranian press turns the page: American conspiracy to spread Islamophobia in the world