A jury on Friday afternoon convicted the man who was charged with stabbing and trying to kill the author Salman Rushdie as he delivered a lecture at a literary gathering in western New York state in 2022.
Hadi Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, was quickly declared guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. He could receive up to 25 years in prison at a sentencing hearing tentatively set for 23 April.
Jurors deliberated for less than two hours on Friday afternoon, after lawyers’ closing arguments followed days of testimony that included a vivid account from Rushdie of how he was certain he was going to die at the hands of a man who rushed him on stage with a knife.
Matar was also found guilty of assault on the man Rushdie was talking to on stage, Ralph Henry Reese, who was wounded in the attack.
The district attorney, Jason Schmidt, had played a slow-motion video of the attack for the jury on Friday morning, pointing out the assailant as he emerged from the audience, walked up a staircase to the stage and broke into a run toward Rushdie.
After Matar’s conviction, Schmidt said such evidence “really is as compelling as it can possibly get”.
“Mr Matar came into this community as a visitor,” Schmidt remarked. “And, really, it’s my job that he stays a resident of New York state for the next 25 years.”
Seated at the defense table, Matar had no obvious reaction to his conviction. His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, later said Matar was “disappointed” but “quite frankly … well prepared for the verdict”.
The shocking attack occurred more than 35 years after Rushdie, 77, the Indian-born British American novelist, was first placed under a death warrant, or fatwa, by Iranian religious leaders angry at his depiction of Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
The assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors had not proved that Matar intended to kill Rushdie. Therefore, Brautigan argued that prosecutors had not proven their case against Matar.
“You will agree something bad happened to Mr Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr Matar’s conscious objective was,” Brautigan said.
Matar had attacked 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.
Rushdie had earlier described to the court how he was on the stage at the open-air event, facing co-speaker Reese – who helped launch an organization providing sanctuary to writers exiled under the threat of persecution – and the audience, when “this assault began”.
“I was aware of this person rushing at me from my right-hand side,” Rushdie recounted. “I was aware of someone with dark hair and dark clothes … I was struck by his eyes which seemed dark and ferocious to me … He hit me very hard … I saw a large quantity of blood pouring on to my clothes. He was hitting me repeatedly. Hitting and slashing.”
The author told jurors that as he was stabbed repeatedly, “it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying”. He lost the sight in one eye as well as other lasting injuries.
During the trial, Schmidt said while it was 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”.
Audience members ultimately pulled the attacker off, detaining him until authorities arrested him.
Schmidt reminded jurors about the testimony of a trauma surgeon, who said Rushdie’s injuries would have been deadly without quick treatment.
The district attorney 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 raised his arms and stood from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fell and were surrounded by onlookers who separated them.
Rushdie could be seen flailing, waving a hand covered in bright red blood. Schmidt froze on a frame showing Rushdie, his face also bloodied, as he was surrounded by people.
“We’ve shown you intent,” Schmidt said.
The video evidence also picked up the gasps and screams from audience members listening to Rushdie talk to Reese about keeping writers safe. Reese suffered a gash to his forehead.
A separate but related federal indictment alleges that Matar’s motivation to try to kill Rushdie was a 2006 speech in which the leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie’s death.
Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he traveled freely for the last 25 years.
A trial for Matar on federal terrorism-related charges is scheduled for later in US district court in Buffalo.
PEN America, one of the US’s largest nonprofits and dedicated to protecting free expression in literature, issued a statement saying convicting Rushdie’s would-be killer was “an important step toward justice for this unparalleled writer”.
“And [it] reaffirms that violence can never be the answer to ideas,” the statement said.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
