Salman Rushdie attacker found guilty of attempted murder

Salman Rushdie, the author who stabbed and partially blinded him at a New York literary award ceremony, was found guilty of attempted murder by Hadi Matar.

The assault on Rushdie by Matar on stage at an arts institute event in August 2022 was decided by jurors on Friday.

The Satanic Verses author, 77, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestines, and requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.

Matar, 27, can be seen in the video of the attack as Rushdie was introduced to the audience to discuss protecting writers from harm. During the seven days of testimony, the jury was given access to some of the videos.

For stabbing Henry Reese, the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a nonprofit organization that assists exiled writers, who was speaking with Rushdie that morning, Matar was found guilty of attempted murder in the second degree as well as assault in the second degree.

He will be sentenced on April 23 and faces up to 25 years in prison.

Nathaniel Barone, a public defender representing Matar, said his client was disappointed by the verdict.

“The video, I think, was extremely damaging to Mr Matar”, Barone said outside the courtroom, referring to a video of the attack that was shown repeatedly to jurors. “It’s that old expression: A picture is worth a thousand words”.

Matar quietly uttered “Free Palestine” as he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, reiterating remarks he has frequently made while both entering and leaving the trial.

New York-based British American Rushdie, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel, The Satanic Verses, which Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous.

American Lebanese Matar claimed that he had attacked Rushdie because he had attacked Islam after the knife-assault.

Matar is also accused of attempting to kill Rushdie in a terrorist-related plot and of providing material support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the US designates as a terrorist organization, in federal court documents. Hezbollah had endorsed Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie.