Saif Ali Khan wants to forgive the man who broke into his Mumbai home and drove a kitchen knife into his spine. He just has not quite managed it yet.
“I would be happy to forgive him,” the 55-year-old actor told journalist Barkha Dutt on stage at the We The Women festival in London, where he was honoured as a Global Changemaker. Then came the dry, deadpan turn the room had been waiting for: “It’s just that part where you tried to kill me is something I’m finding hard to let go.”
The audience laughed. When Dutt asked whether he was being ironic, Khan said he was not.
“I Would Be Happy to Forgive Him”
The remarks come from an on-stage conversation recorded in June 2026 and published by Mojo Story, which has been written up afresh this week as the trial of his alleged attacker gets underway in a Mumbai court.
Khan does not believe the intruder came looking for a fight. In his telling, the man was after “a meal or a buck,” and the night spiralled because Khan leapt on him in the dark. “I probably shouldn’t have jumped on him,” he said. “Now he’s probably going to spend a long time in jail.”
He framed the attack as a question of inequality rather than personal enmity. “I think it’s a question really of haves and have-nots,” he said. “It’s inequality that’s led to this.” When the line drew applause, he waved it off: “I’m not looking for an applause there.”
The instinct to forgive, he explained, is rooted at home. His children say the Lord’s Prayer every night — a Christian influence he traces to his mother-in-law’s side of the family — and forgiveness sits at its centre. “They’re not just words,” he said. “I think it frees us also to get over things like this.”
“Two Knives Is Two Knives”: The Night of the Attack
The attack happened in the early hours of January 16, 2025, at the family’s Bandra West home in Mumbai. According to the police chargesheet, the intruder entered through a bathroom attached to the room of Khan’s younger son, Jeh, intending to steal.
Khan described being woken by the nanny and walking, half-asleep, into the dark room. The man had already cut the nanny and nicked the baby. “Maybe if I put the lights on and said, ‘Do you know where you are and what you’re doing?’ I could have talked it out,” he said. “Something took over.”
He jumped on the intruder, who was carrying two blades. “He wasn’t a very big fellow, but two knives is two knives,” Khan said. The fight turned when Geeta, a member of the household staff, walked in, picked the man up and threw him across the room. The London audience cheered.
Khan and Geeta retreated upstairs, at one point grabbing ceremonial swords off the walls. They locked the intruder in the room, and he escaped the way he had come.
“That’s How Close I Came to Getting Paralysed”
Then Khan noticed the blood. Lying on the floor in his kurta pyjama, he thought he might die, and he described the moment with startling calm. “They say a warrior’s death is quite a good one,” he said. Flooded with adrenaline, he felt he had had “a full life” and wanted only to hold one of his children’s hands and say goodbye. “And then I kind of woke up a bit more and said, no, it’s not done yet.”
The first blow had been the worst. A cheap kitchen knife snapped against his backbone, and a six-inch piece of blade lodged in his vertebra and nicked his spinal cord. He had felt the sensation going in his right leg. “That’s how close I came to getting paralysed,” he said.
When it was time to leave for the hospital, Khan wanted his elder son, Taimur, beside him. Kareena Kapoor Khan asked if he was okay, he said yes, and she took Jeh to her sister’s. They went in an auto rickshaw. On the way, Taimur looked at his father and asked whether he was going to die. “I said no, but there’s something in my back that hurts a lot,” Khan recalled. “But I’m not going to die.”
At Lilavati Hospital, the emergency room was half-asleep. Khan asked for a stretcher and got a blank look, until he said, “I’m Saif Ali Khan.” After that, he said, “all hell broke loose,” and the doctors made the right calls. He was treated for wounds to his neck, back and left hand and discharged five days later.
“Now He’s Probably Going to Spend a Long Time in Jail”
Police arrested Mohammad Shariful Islam Shehzad, a 30-year-old Bangladeshi national, three days after the attack. The chargesheet says his motive was theft and that he did not know whose home he had entered. Forensic tests matched knife fragments from the scene, from Khan’s body and from the accused as three pieces of one knife.
The trial began on October 24, 2026, with the family’s staff nurse — the complainant and first witness — identifying the accused in court and testifying that the intruder had demanded Rs 1 crore during the break-in. The court rejected the accused’s second attempt to plead guilty and ordered the trial to proceed.
The family, Khan says, has “processed it quite healthily.” Taimur has notes on technique: he should have punched the man, not grabbed him. Jeh handed his father a plastic sword and told him to sleep with it next time. At the festival, Dutt played a clip from Kareena’s appearance a year earlier, in which she said the boys now see their father as Batman and Iron Man. The one lasting change is security. Khan never liked uniformed guards standing around, but concedes: “It’s a sign of the times.”
Khan, now 55 and 35 years into his career, said the only thing he wants now is to be more present. His parents once worried he would never stop asking his father for money. “I got a job,” he said. “I’m already a star in my book.”
He has not forgotten that a man tried to kill him in his children’s room. But he would still rather forgive him.
Also read: Saif Ali Khan Sells Bandra Flat for Rs 4.11 Crore
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