ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s former prime minister Imran Khan has condemned the attack on novelist Salman Rushdie, describing it as “terrible” and “sad,” and saying while the anger of the Muslim world over Rushdie’s book The Satanic Verses was understandable, it did not justify the assault.

Ten years ago, Khan pulled out of an event in India because Rushdie would also be appearing and the two men exchanged insults. But in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian published on Friday, when asked for his response to the knife attack in New York state that left Rushdie badly wounded, Khan said: “I think it’s terrible, sad.”

“Rushdie understood [why his book was offesnive], because he came from a Muslim family. He knows the love, respect, reverence of a prophet that lives in our hearts. He knew that,” Khan said. “So the anger I understood, but you can’t justify what happened.”

The man accused of stabbing Rushdie last week in western New York pleaded not guilty to second-degree attempted murder and assault charges on Thursday and was held without bail.

Hadi Matar, 24, is accused of wounding Rushdie, 75, on Friday just before the author was to deliver a lecture on stage at an educational retreat near Lake Erie. Rushdie was hospitalized with serious injuries in what writers and politicians around the world decried as an attack on the freedom of expression.

The attack came 33 years after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims to assassinate Rushdie a few months after “The Satanic Verses” was published. Many Muslims saw passages in the book about the Prophet Muhammad as blasphemous.

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.

In 1998, Iran President Mohammad Khatami government distanced itself from the fatwa, saying the threat against Rushdie was over.

But the multimillion-dollar bounty has since grown and the fatwa was never lifted: Khomeini’s successor, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was suspended from Twitter in 2019 for saying the fatwa against Rushdie was “irrevocable.”