Feb. 21 (UPI) — A jury on Friday convicted a New Jersey man of second-degree attempted murder and assault in the brutal stabbing of author Salman Rushdie on an upstate New York lecture stage in 2022.
Hadi Matar, 27, was found guilty within two hours of deliberations after the two-week trial in Chautauqua County Court. Matar also was found guilty of assault for injuring Henry Reese, who was moderating the event.
County Judge David Foley set sentencing for April 23. Matar could receive up to 25 years in prison.
Matar faces separate federal terrorism-linked charges in Buffalo for allegedly providing assistance to the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah. The charges allege that Matar may have been motivated by an endorsement of a fatwa by Hezbollah.
Matar, who rejected a plea deal in the state case, did not testify and the defense called no witnesses.
Rushdie, now 77, was the prosecution’s key witness during seven days of testimony. He described in graphic detail what happened on Aug. 12, 2022, and his painful recovery. He lost one eye in the attack.
Rushdie, who sat about 20 feet away from Matar, said that he feared he was dying.
“I saw a large quantity of blood pouring onto my clothes,” said Rushdie, who initially thought he was being struck by the man’s fist. “He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing.”
Rushdie was stabbed and slashed more than a dozen times in the head, throat, torso, thigh and hand. He spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation center.
His 2024 memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, described his ordeal.
During his closing arguments, District Attorney Jason Schmidt played a slow-motion video of the attack
“I want you to look at the unprovoked nature of this attack,” Schmidt said. “I want you to look at the targeted nature of the attack. There were a lot of people around that day but there was only one person who was targeted.”
Schmidt reminded jurors a trauma surgeon testified Rushdie’s injuries would have been fatal without quick treatment.
Assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan said that prosecutors hadn’t proved that Matar intended to kill Rushdie.
“You will agree something bad happened to Mr. Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr. Matar’s conscious objective was,” Brautigan said. “The testimony you have heard doesn’t establish anything more than a chaotic noisy outburst that occurred that injured Mr. Rushdie.”
Another public defender, Nathaniel Barone, told reporters Matar likely would have faced a lesser charge of assault were it not for Rushdie’s celebrity.
“We think that it became an attempted murder because of the notoriety of the alleged victim in the case,” Barone said after testimony concluded Thursday. “That’s been it from the very beginning. It’s been nothing more, nothing less. And it’s for publicity purposes. It’s for self-interest purposes.”
Rushdie, a dual American-Lebonese citizen, spent years in hiding after Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for his death in 1989 after the publication of his novel The Satanic Verse, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
But after Khomeini announced that it would not enforce the decree, Rushdie traveled freely for the past 25 years.
