Mayville:
A jury will hear the opening statements of lawyers on Monday in the Hadi Matar process, accused of trying to kill the novel writer Salman Rushdie during a lecture in New York.
Rushdie will then be one of the first witnesses to witnesses at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, a few minutes north of the Chautauqua Institution, a rural art paradise where the writer was stabbed in August 2022.
Matar, 26, can be seen in videos that hurry the stage of the institution when Rushdie was introduced to the public for a conversation about protecting writers. Rushdie, 77, was stabbed several times with a knife in the head, neck, trunk and left hand, his right eye blinded and his liver and intestines damaged.
Matar has argued not guilty of accusations of second -degree attempted murder and second -degree attack brought by the public prosecutor in Chautauqua County. Since the publication of his novel ‘The Satanic Verses’, Rushdie has confronted with death threats.
Rushdie has published memoirs about the attack and his long recovery in which he introduces a conversation with his attacker. He said he believed that he would die on the podium of the Chautauqua institution.
Rushdie, who was raised in a Muslim Kashmiri family, went to hide in 1989 under the protection of the British police after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then the supreme leader of Iran, stated “the Satanic verses” to be blastemous. Khomeini’s Fatwa, or religious Edict, called on Muslims to kill the novelist and everyone involved in the publication of the book, which led to a bounty of millions of dollars and the murder of the Japanese translator of Rushdie, Hitoshi Igarashi.
The Iranian government said in 1998 that it would no longer support the Fatwa, and Rushdie ended his years as a recluse and became a fixture of literary meetings in New York City, where he lives.
After the attack, Matar told the New York Post that he had traveled from his house in New Jersey after he saw the Rushdie event advertising because he did not like the novelist and said Rushdie had attacked Islam. Matar, a double citizen of his native US and Lebanon, said in the interview that he was surprised that Rushdie survived, De Post reported.
The Matar process has been delayed twice, the most recently after his lawyer who tried in vain to move it to another location, and said that Matar could not get a fair trial in Chautauqua. The process is held in Mayville, a city on Lake about 1500 people near the Canadian border.
If convicted of attempted murder, Matar stands for a maximum punishment of 25 years in prison.
Matar is also confronted with federal charges set by officers in the office of the American attorney in western New York, and accuses him of an attempt to kill Rushdie as an act of terrorism and offering material support To the armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, who has designated the US as a terrorist organization. Matar will face these costs during a separate test in Buffalo.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)