Salman Rushdie brands alleged knife attacker a ‘dumb clown who got lucky’ as he opens up about 2022 attack

SIR Salman Rushdie has branded his alleged knife attacker a “dumb clown who got lucky”.

The author, 76, blasts Hadi Matar as an inept would-be assassin and an “incel” in his upcoming memoir, Knife.

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He was left blind in one eye and with horrific neck, face and hand injuries after being attacked at a book event in New York in 2022.

It came more than three decades after Iran’s leaders issued a fatwa death order against Sir Salman for his novel, The Satanic Verses.

In a US edition of Knife, read by The Sun on Sunday, the author reveals he had a premonition of an attack — dreaming of being speared by a gladiator days earlier.

Of the stabbing, he writes: “Why now, after all these years?”

He describes the assailant as “some sort of time traveller, a murderous ghost from the past”.

He adds: “Don’t make him sound like an angel of doom. He’s just a dumb clown who got lucky.”

Sir Salman also tells of a cancer scare soon after that turned out as a false alarm.

Matar, 24, has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder.

His January trial was put on hold to allow his legal team to seek material related to Sir Salman’s memoir.