Rushdie stabber found guilty of attempted murder

A New Jersey man was on Friday convicted of attempted murder for stabbing author Salman Rushdie multiple times on a New York lecture stage in 2022.

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Jurors, who deliberated for less than two hours, also found Hadi Matar (27) guilty of assault for wounding a man who was on stage with Rushdie at the time.

Matar ran onto the stage at the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was about to speak on August 12, 2022, and stabbed him more than a dozen times before a live audience. The attack left the 77-year-old prizewinning novelist blind in one eye.

Rushdie was the key witness during seven days of testimony, describing in graphic detail his life-threatening injuries and long and painful recovery. Matar, sitting at the defence table, looked down but had no obvious reaction when the jury delivered the verdict. As he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he quietly uttered, “Free Palestine,” echoing comments he has frequently made while entering and leaving the trial.

The judge set sentencing for April 23. Matar could receive up to 25 years in prison. His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, said Matar was disappointed but also well-prepared for the verdict. 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 over three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation centre. He detailed his painful recovery in his memoir, “Knife.”

A separate federal indictment alleges that Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, 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.