Salman Rushdie trial: Guilty verdict reached in trial of man accused of making an attempt to kill writer | EUROtoday

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A New York jury has convicted Hadi Matar of making an attempt to kill Salman Rushdie, a Booker Prize-winning novelist who was critically wounded and blinded in a single eye within the harrowing knife assault two-and-a-half years in the past.

Matar, 27, discovered his destiny Friday, practically two weeks after the trial started on February 10.

He appeared down when the decision was learn, and mentioned, “Free Palestine,” as he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, WGRZ experiences.

The jury deliberated for lower than two hours.

The attacker was additionally discovered responsible of assault for injuring a person onstage with Rushdie.

The New Jersey man had pleaded not responsible to each expenses. He faces as much as 25 years in jail, and his sentencing listening to is ready for April 23.

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“We had a number of different angles to show the jurors,” District Attorney Jason Schmidt told reporters after the verdict. “It really is as compelling as it can possibly get.”

The Independent has contacted Rushdie’s representatives for remark.

Matar’s protection informed CBS News he was dissatisfied by the jury’s determination however had been getting ready for that risk.

Matar’s trial befell at Chautauqua County Court in western New York, a brief distance from the Chautauqua Institution, the place the knife assault unfolded on August 12, 2022.

Rushdie was about to talk in entrance of an viewers on the amphitheater when a masked man rushed at him onstage, stabbing and slashing him greater than a dozen instances.

On the second day of the trial, Rushdie, now 77, confronted Matar for the primary time as he calmly informed a jury concerning the frenzied moments of the assault, revealing that he believed he was going to die.

“It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought,” the famend writer mentioned, including that the individuals who subdued the assailant probably saved his life.

The celebrated Indian-born, British-American writer has confronted demise threats since his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was declared blasphemous by Iran’s then-supreme chief Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

“I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in,” Rushdie testified in court docket. “My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.”

During the trial, jurors watched chaotic footage of the assault that confirmed the attacker rapidly hanging the writer again and again earlier than being tackled by bystanders and pinned to the stage.

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“I want you to look at the unprovoked nature of this attack,” Schmidt mentioned in court docket on Friday of the movies throughout his closing argument. “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.”

Four movies, every shot from totally different angles, present solely glimpses of the severely injured Rushdie, who fell to the stage close to the attacker.

Each man is surrounded by individuals, one group holding Matar down and the opposite tending to Rushdie’s wounds. Someone brings a stack of towels and one other elevates his legs.

Henry Reese, the co-founder of City of Asylum Pittsburgh, a protected haven for persecuted authors and artists, was set to interview Rushdie on stage as a part of the lecture. He was additionally injured within the assault.

Investigator Scott Mills testified that he took an announcement from Rushdie and a DNA swab 10 days later, when the writer was nonetheless hospitalized in Erie, Pennsylvania.

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Rushdie had been stabbed and slashed within the head, eye, neck, torso, leg and hand, and spent 17 days on the hospital and greater than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation middle.

The attacker’s protection argued that prosecutors didn’t show Matar wished to kill the writer, a core part of the tried homicide cost.

“You will agree something bad happened to Mr. Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr. Matar’s conscious objective was,” assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan informed jurors. “The testimony you have heard doesn’t establish anything more than a chaotic noisy outburst that occurred that injured Mr. Rushdie.”

They additionally claimed Rushdie’s celeb prompted Matar to face unduly extreme expenses for the assault.

Matar didn’t testify throughout the trial, and his protection didn’t name any witnesses on his behalf.

The 2022 assault is the topic of Rushdie’s memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

The New Jersey man was additionally indicted on federal terrorism expenses associated to the stabbing. A trial date for these expenses has but to be confirmed.

The terror indictment alleges Matar was motivated by a Hezbollah chief’s 2006 endorsement of Khomeini’s decades-old fatwa.

The authentic 1989 edict despatched Rushdie into hiding for years, however the writer of Midnight’s Children and Victory City traveled freely over the previous quarter century after Iran introduced it might not implement the fatwa.