Mother of Salman Rushdie's attempted assassin: "I'm done with him!"

(cont.) “He’s the cliché of the loner,” said Desmond Boyle, who owns a small, garage-style gym where Mr. Matar was learning to box.

Mr. Matar had worked at a Marshalls clothing store before his arrest, a company official said. His mother told DailyMail.com in an interview that she confirmed Tuesday, that he went months without speaking to her or his siblings. He blamed her for encouraging him to focus on academics rather than religious studies.

Jorge Diaz said he often attended the same 6:30 p.m. class as Mr. Matar at State of Fitness Boxing Club, a gym in North Bergen, N.J., about two miles from Mr. Matar’s house.

“Always, like, isolated,” Mr. Diaz, 34, said. “Always by himself — very quiet.”

Unlike most beginning students, he had arrived in April prepared to register immediately, without first taking a sample class as most students do, said the club’s manager, Rosaria Calabrese.

Polite and reserved, he kept almost entirely to himself, rarely speaking above a whisper, several students and instructors said.

Mr. Boyle said that he had pulled Mr. Matar aside at least twice to engage him, an effort that fell flat. Mr. Boyle, a firefighter, said decades as a recovering alcoholic had made him especially attuned to “working with those who need help.”

“It looked like the saddest day of his life,” Mr. Boyle said in an interview, “but he came in looking like that every day.”

“You can tell he grew up quiet,” he added. “Maybe a little bit on the outside. Never really fitting in.”

Mr. Matar had little boxing experience — “two left feet,” Mr. Boyle said — and made limited progress during the 27 sessions he attended in the brick-lined workout space filled with punching bags that hang suspended from the ceiling.

Three days before the attack he had canceled his monthly membership to State of Fitness — a $158 package that permitted unlimited classes and practice time, Ms. Calabrese said.

“He was saying, ‘I can’t come back right now,’ ” she said.

People who witnessed the stabbing at Chautauqua described the assailant’s raw strength. At the gym, the man photographed after the attack in handcuffs appeared to have little in common with the thin, awkward student they remembered.

“He didn’t seem aggressive, because he didn’t know how to fight,” said Mr. Diaz, an amateur boxer who has been competing for about three years and tried to offer Mr. Matar friendly tips.

“There was a couple times where I actually was: ‘This is how you throw a punch. This is how you do it.’ That’s the type of guy he was.”

A childhood friend from California recalled a similar lack of aggression. “It is completely out of character for him to do what he is being accused of doing,” said Uriel Alberdin, 26.

Mr. Alberdin was 10 when he met Mr. Matar, then 8. The two became close friends during regular visits the younger boy made to see his father, who lived in Bell, Calif., a town near Los Angeles, after separating from Mr. Matar’s mother, Mr. Alberdin said.

“It doesn’t sound like him,” said Mr. Alberdin, an architecture student who described playing video games with Mr. Matar and sharing a love for the comic heroes Spiderman and Superman.

“He was like a best friend to me,” Mr. Alberdin said.

The two communicated about twice a year, mainly on social media, after Mr. Matar’s family moved to the East Coast.

“The conversation never got deep, it never got weird,” Mr. Alberdin said. “It was your basic — checking on your friend to see how he was doing.”

But the email Mr. Matar sent suddenly asking that his gym membership be canceled suggested that he had indeed become interested in the politics of a nation the United States has designated a state sponsor of terrorism. (cont.)

(cont.) Ms. Calabrese said she noticed the avatar on the email only after Mr. Matar’s arrest: Just to the left of his name is a circular image of a bearded cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s 83-year-old current supreme leader, a copy of the correspondence viewed by The New York Times shows.

It was Mr. Khamenei’s predecessor, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who issued the fatwa calling for the death of Mr. Rushdie, who quickly became a worldwide symbol of free speech. The edict led the Indian-born writer who was reared in Britain to live in and out of hiding before eventually moving to the United States, where he has maintained an increasingly public life in spite of past death threats.

He had been scheduled to talk on Friday about the United States as a safe haven for exiled writers. Prosecutors said Mr. Matar had ridden a bus to the Chautauqua Institution’s bucolic 750-acre gated compound, a center founded on the idea of earnest inquiry and discourse.

And just after Mr. Rushdie sat down, Mr. Matar rushed the stage, prosecutors said, and began furiously jabbing his fists at a man three times his age.

Witnesses realized moments later that the assailant was holding a knife.

Yeah, right.

How nice for her.

He looks much older than 24.

But, but, but...is the assailant hawt?

[quote]The man accused of stabbing Sir Salman Rushdie has reportedly said he has only read two pages of the author's controversial novel The Satanic Verses.

Has the moderator lost an eye as well? Look at that shit, it looks like a black hole!

Matar, as a Muslim, stabbed Rushdie, who blasphamied against Islam, with the imprematur of an Imam's fatwa. Reading Rushie's book is completely irrelevant to Matar and his goal.