New York:
An American-Libanese man was found guilty by a jury on Friday of an attempt to kill novel writer Salman Rushdie when storming a stage and repeatedly a knife in the author of the “Satanic Versezen” immersed.
Hadi Matar is now confronted with a maximum of 25 years in prison and will be convicted on April 23, a judicial officer said in a statement that confirms the conviction about attempted murder and abuse.
The legal team of Matar had tried to prevent witnesses from characterizing Rushdie as a victim of persecution after Iran’s Fatwa from 1989 in which he called on his murder of supposed blasphemy in ‘the satanic verses’.
Rushdie had told jury members during the trial that Matar “stuck to him and cut” during the event in August 2022 in a luxury cultural center in the New York countryside.
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, then I screamed because of the pain,” said Rushdie, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood”.
He said it “came up with me, I died” before he became a Healiopter to a trauma hospital.
Jury members heard concluding arguments from both public prosecutors and lawyers before they withdraw their ruling on Friday.
Matar was quickly found guilty of stabbing Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch knife shown to witnesses and the court.
He repeatedly used the process in stands and shouted Pro-Palestinian slogans several times.
– Debate in free speech –
Matar previously told the media that he had only read two pages of “The Satanic verses”, but believed that the author “had attacked Islam”.
Rushdie lived ten years after the Fatwa of 1989 in seclusion in London, but in the last 20 years – until the attack – he lived relatively normally in New York.
He became the center of a fierce tug of war between proponents of freedom of expression and those who insisted that insulting religion, in particular Islam, was unacceptable in all circumstances.
Last year he published a memoir called “Knife” in which he told the near-death experience.
The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye had been broken and he told the court that “it was decided that the eye would be sewn closed to make it hydrated. It was quite a painful operation – which I did not recommend.”
Asked to describe the intensity of pain during the attack, he said it was “a 10” out of 10.
The apple of his Adam was also partially torn and his liver and small intestine penetrated.
“The first thing I said about recovering the ability of speech was” I can speak, “he said to suppress the laughter of jury members.
“How do you squeeze toothpaste with just one hand on a toothbrush?” He explained when he was asked about injuries on his hand while he tried to defend himself.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)