Feb. 11 (UPI) — Renowned British-Indian author Salman Rushdie testified Tuesday in the trial of the man accused of attempting to kill him in 2022 in New York.
“I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in,” Rushdie told a jury and Chautauqua County Judge David Foley.
Hadi Matar, 27, was accused of running onstage during an event featuring Rushdie and stabbing him in front of a large crowd on Aug. 12, 2022, at the Chautauqua Institute’s amphitheater.
“My sense of time was quite cloudy,” said Rushdie. “I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.”
On Monday, the trial began with opening statements.
According to attorneys, the trial will last up to two weeks. Matar, of Fairview, N.J., faces 32 years in prison if convicted.
Rushdie, 77, recovered but a stab wound left him blind in his right eye. The two had not spoken before the incident, he said. He suffered injuries in the neck, head, torso and his left hand.
“Everything happened very quickly,” he said. “I was stabbed repeatedly, and most painfully in my eye. I struggled to get away. I held up my hand in self-defense and was stabbed through that.”
A jury was selected last week at the Chautauqua County Courthouse in southwest New York. And about 15 witnesses are set to testify against Matar, according to District Attorney Jason Schmidt.
Meanwhile, Chautauqua Institute employee Jordan Steves said he saw a “violent interaction with someone swinging their arms at an onstage guest” as Matar’s public defender Lynn Schaffer told the court the prosecution has more to prove beyond video and photo evidence.
In his opening statement, Schmidt claimed that “without hesitation, this man, holding his knife,” he said of Matar, “forcefully and efficiently in its speed, plunged the knife into Mr. Rushdie over and over and over and over again.”
“He hit me very hard around my jawline and neck,” Rushdie testified on Tuesday, saying “I wasn’t keeping score” when asked how many times he was stabbed, but was assailed roughly 15 times.
“Initially I thought he’d punched me with his fist, but very soon afterwards I saw a large quantity of blood pouring on to my clothes,” he continued. “He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing.”
Rushdie was hospitalized for more that two weeks and told the court of how he had to communicate by wiggling his toes while on a ventilator.
Matar, a dual American citizen who grew up in Lebanon, faces separate federal terrorism-linked charges in Buffalo for allegedly providing assistance to the Iran-backed Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah.
He was heard uttering the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” on Tuesday as he was ushered into the western New York courtroom.
The charges allege that Matar may of been motivated by an endorsement of a fatwa by the Iran-backed terror group Hezbollah.
For decades, Rushdie faced death threats and went into hiding after his published 1988 novel The Satanic Verses — which Rushdie said was inspired by the life of the Muslim Prophet Muhammad — was labeled as blasphemous by Muslim groups.
And Iran’s long-since-dead Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at the time called for Rushdie’s execution, going so far to issue a $3 million fatwa on the author a year after The Satanic Verses was released.
The Iranian bounty forced Rushdie into hiding for years when he was only seen in public with a security detail.
“The elements of the crime are more than ‘something really bad happened,’ they’re more defined,” Matar’s defense attorney said. “Something very bad did happen, but the district attorney has to prove much more than that.”
