Feb 4 (Reuters) – The trial of the man charged with attempting to murder the novelist Salman Rushdie at a New York lecture began on Tuesday with jury selection.
Hadi Matar, 26, can be seen in cellphone videos rushing the stage at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York in August 2022, as Rushdie was being introduced to the audience. Rushdie, 77, was stabbed with a knife multiple times in an attack that led to the loss of his right eye and damaged his liver.
Matar has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault brought by the Chautauqua County district attorney. Rushdie, who has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” is due to be among the first witnesses to testify at the trial.
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Rushdie has published a memoir about the attack, and said in interviews 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.
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 parties 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 at the Chautauqua County Court in Mayville, a town of about 1,500 people near the Canadian border.
Jason Schmidt, the district attorney, has estimated it may take one or two weeks to seat the jury.
If convicted of attempted murder, Matar faces a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
Matar also faces federal chargesbrought 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 due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.
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(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Editing by Marguerita Choy and Leslie Adler)
