The man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie multiple times as he prepared to give a speech in New York has been convicted of attempted murder.
Hadi Matar, 27, ran onto the stage at the Chautauqua Institution on August 12, 2022, and attacked Rushdie in front of an audience, leaving the 77-year-old prize-sinning novelist blind in one eye.
Stabbed and slashed more than a dozen times in the head, throat, torso, thigh and hand, Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation centre. He detailed his long and painful recovery in his 2024 memoir, “Knife.”
Jurors, who took less than two hours to reach their verdict, also found Matar guilty of assaulting a man who was on stage with Rushdie at the time.
The judge at Chautauqua County Court, in New York state, set sentencing for April 23. Matar, from New Jersey, could receive up to 25 years in prison.
Rushdie was the key witness during seven days of testimony, describing in graphic detail his life-threatening injuries and long and painful recovery.
District Attorney Jason Schmidt played a slow-motion video of the attack for the jury Friday during his closing argument, pointing out the assailant as he emerged from the audience, walked up a staircase to the stage and broke into a run toward Rushdie.
“I want you to look at the unprovoked nature of this attack,” Schmidt said. “I want you to look at the targeted nature of the attack. There were a lot of people around that day but there was only one person who was targeted.”
Assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors had not proved that Matar intended to kill Rushdie. The distinction is important for an attempted-murder conviction.
“You will agree something bad happened to Mr Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr Matar’s conscious objective was,” Brautigan said. “The testimony you have heard doesn’t establish anything more than a chaotic noisy outburst that occurred that injured Mr Rushdie.”
Matar had with him knives, not a gun or bomb, his attorneys have said previously. And in response to testimony that the injuries were life-threatening, they have noted that Rushdie’s heart and lungs were uninjured.
Schmidt said while it’s not possible to read Matar’s mind, “it’s foreseeable that if you’re going to stab someone 10 or 15 times about the face and neck, it’s going to result in a fatality”.
Rushdie told jurors he thought he was dying when a masked stranger ran onto the stage and stabbed and slashed at him until being tackled by bystanders.
The Booker Prize-winning author showed jurors his now-blinded right eye, usually hidden behind a darkened eyeglass lens.
Schmidt reminded jurors about the testimony of a trauma surgeon, who said Rushdie’s injuries would have been fatal without quick treatment.
He also slowed down video showing Matar approaching the seated Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife.
Rushdie raises his arms and rises from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.
Rushdie is seen flailing on the ground, waving a hand covered in bright red blood. Schmidt freezes on a frame showing Rushdie, his face also bloodied, as he’s surrounded by people.
“We’ve shown you intent,” Schmidt said.
The recordings also picked up the gasps and screams from audience members who had been seated to hear Rushdie speak with City of Asylum Pittsburgh founder Henry Reese about keeping writers safe.
Reese suffered a gash to his forehead, leading to the assault charge against Matar.
Throughout the trial, Matar often took notes with a pen and sometimes laughed or smiled with his defence team during breaks in testimony. His lawyers declined to call any witnesses of their own and Matar did not testify in his defence.
A separate federal indictment alleges that Matar was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.
Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after publication of the novel ‘The Satanic Verses,’ which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he had travelled freely over the past quarter century.
A trial on the federal terrorism-related charges will be scheduled in US District Court in Buffalo.
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