NEW YORK – Hadi Matar he was not even born when the Ayatollah was born on February 14, 1989 Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa – the death sentence according to Islamic dictates – against the Anglo-Indian writer Salman Rushdie for having “insulted” Islam with his followers Satanic verses. Born in 1997, the man who yesterday morning attacked the writer Salman Rushdie armed with a knife after entering the Chautauqua Institution with a regular ticket – a true temple of American culture, in the village of the same name near Jamestown, southwest of the state of New York – would have Lebanese origins. At least that’s what certain extremist sites, pro-Iran and pro-Hezbollah like iranarabic.com say, which last night, via Twitter, associated the image of his arrest with the face of the affected writer.
A tweet, subsequently deleted – but already bounced on the net enough to be copied, thus describes the young man as “the Lebanese hero who insulted the Prophet, Mohammed, the messenger of God”. And several other posts in Arabic and Farsi also “celebrated” the attacker (including an account with the photo of Hassan Nasrallah, yes in short, the Shiite leader of Hezbollah).
Matar, according to the first reconstructions, acted alone, after having made a long journey seven hours (it is not known by what means) arriving in the village 100 kilometers from Buffalo, from New Jersey. Yes, because the young man, who according to a Facebook profile that some American sites recognize as him, was born in Aain Qana, in southern Lebanon. And after spending at least a time in California where he has numerous relatives, he moved to the town of Fairview, across the river but just 25 minutes from Manhattan, New York.
In a simple two-story row house located at 417 Morningside Avenue, where he lived, again according to unconfirmed reconstructions, with his mother and a brother. In short, in that industrial “suburbia” where young extremists have already started in the past. Like the Afghan Ahmad Khan Rahami who in September 2016 moved from Elizabeth, also in New Jersey, with a pressure cooker filled with explosives that he then detonated in Chelsea, in the mundane heart of the Big Apple, injuring 29 people.
Last night the Fairview house, flown over by dozens of helicopters, surrounded by agents and onlookers kept away with yellow tapes to isolate the entire area, was thoroughly searched by FBI agents, who also interrogated family and neighbors. His sympathies for Shiite extremism and the Guards of the Islamic Revolution clearly emerged from his social accounts, but for those who lived a few meters from him, he was a boy like any other. Maybe just more shy.