By Jonathan Allen
MAYVILLE, New York (Reuters) – A jury will hear attorneys’ opening statements on Monday in the trial of Hadi Matar, who is charged with attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie at a New York lecture.
Rushdie is then due to be among the first witnesses to testify at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, New York, a few minutes north of the Chautauqua Institution, a rural arts haven where the writer was stabbed in August 2022.
Matar, 26, can be seen in videos rushing the institution’s stage as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience for a talk about keeping writers safe from harm. Rushdie, 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.
Matar has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault brought by the Chautauqua County district attorney. Rushdie has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses.”
Rushdie has published a memoir about the attack and his lengthy recuperation in which he imagines a conversation with his assailant. He has said he believed he was going to die on the Chautauqua Institution’s stage.
Rushdie, who was raised in a Muslim Kashmiri family, went into hiding under the protection of British police in 1989 after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, pronounced “The Satanic Verses” to be blasphemous. Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious edict, called upon Muslims to kill the novelist and anyone involved in the book’s publication, leading to a multimillion-dollar bounty and the 1991 murder of Rushdie’s Japanese translator, Hitoshi Igarashi.
The Iranian government said in 1998 it would no longer back the fatwa, and Rushdie ended his years as a recluse, becoming a fixture of literary gatherings in New York City, where he lives.
After the attack, Matar told the New York Post that he had traveled from his home in New Jersey after seeing the Rushdie event advertised because he disliked the novelist, saying Rushdie had attacked Islam. Matar, a dual citizen of his native U.S. and Lebanon, said in the interview he was surprised that Rushdie survived, the Post reported.
Matar’s trial has been delayed twice, most recently after his defense lawyer unsuccessfully tried to move it to a different venue, saying Matar could not get a fair trial in Chautauqua. The trial is being held in Mayville, a lakeside town of about 1,500 people near the Canadian border.
If convicted of attempted murder, Matar faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office in western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism and of providing material support to the armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the U.S. has designated as a terrorist organization. Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.
(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in Mayville; Editing by Diane Craft)
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