Salman Rushdie attacker found guilty of attempted murder

Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed and partially blinded prize-winning novelist Salman Rushdie at an event in New York, has been found guilty of attempted murder.

Jurors delivered the verdict on Friday for Matar’s assault on Rushdie on stage at an arts institute’s event in August 2022.

The Satanic Verses author, 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, and requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.

Matar, 27, can be seen in videos of the attack rushing the Chautauqua Institution’s stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Some of the videos were shown to the jury during the seven days of testimony.

Matar was found guilty of attempted murder in the second degree as well as assault in the second degree for stabbing Henry Reese, the co-founder of Pittsburgh’s City of Asylum, a nonprofit group that helps exiled writers, who was conducting the talk with Rushdie that morning.

“The video, I think, was extremely damaging to Mr Matar,” Barone said outside the courtroom, referring to a video of the attack that was shown repeatedly to jurors. “It’s that old expression: A picture is worth a thousand words.”

As he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, Matar quietly uttered “Free Palestine”, echoing comments he has frequently made while entering and leaving the trial.

New York-based British American 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 Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous.

After the knife assault, American Lebanese Matar told the New York Post that he had assaulted Rushdie because he had attacked Islam.

Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism and of providing material support to Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the US designates as a terrorist organisation. Hezbollah had endorsed Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie.

Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.