Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed novelist Salman Rushdie and partially blinded him during an event at a New York arts institute, was convicted of attempted murder on Friday.
Rushdie, 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, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.
In videos of the 2022 attack, 27-year-old Matar can be seen charging onto the stage at the Chautauqua Institution as Salman Rushdie was being introduced for a talk about protecting writers. Some of these videos were shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony.
The writer was among the first to testify at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, calmly describing to jurors how he believed he was going to die and showing them his blinded eye by removing his adapted spectacles with a blacked-out right lens.
Matar was found guilty of attempted murder in the second degree and assault in the second degree for stabbing Henry Reese, the co-founder of Pittsburgh's City of Asylum, a non-profit group that helps exiled writers, who was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.
He will be sentenced on April 23, and faces up to 25 years in prison.
Speaking after the verdict, Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt praised the scores of audience members who rushed to Rushdie's aid when he was attacked.
"I believe the Chautauqua Institution community saved Mr. Rushdie's life by stepping in, and I would say that this entire community deserved quick justice. I'm glad we were able to deliver that for them."
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 video of the attack that was shown repeatedly to jurors, sometimes in slow motion. "It's that old expression, a picture is worth a thousand words."
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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 Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran's supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous.
After the knife assault, Matar told the New York Post, opens new tab that he had traveled from his home in New Jersey after seeing the Rushdie event advertised because he disliked the novelist, saying Rushdie had attacked Islam.
Matar, a dual citizen of his native US and Lebanon, said in the interview that he was surprised Rushdie had survived, the Post reported.
Matar did not testify at his trial. His defense lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had not proved beyond reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault.
Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the US attorney's office in western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism and of providing material support to the armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the US has designated as a terrorist organization.
Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.
Bd-pratidin English/ Afia
