Man found guilty of trying to kill novelist Salman Rushdie

Nevin Al Sukari - Sana'a - Hadi Matar (left), the man accused in the attempted murder of author Salman Rushdie, was found guilty by a jury on February 21, 2025, of attempting to kill Rushdie. — Pic from AFP

NEW YORK, Feb 22 — An American-Lebanese man was found guilty yesterday of attempting to kill novelist Salman Rushdie when storming a stage and repeatedly plunging a knife into the Satanic Verses author.

Hadi Matar faces up to 25 years in prison and will be sentenced in April after being convicted of attempted murder and assault charges over the 2022 attack.

Matar’s legal team had sought to prevent witnesses from characterising Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran’s 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie had told jurors of Matar “stabbing and slashing” him during an event at an upscale cultural centre in rural New York.

“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie said, adding he was left in a “lake of blood.”

He said it “occurred to me I was dying” before he was helicoptered to a trauma hospital.

Jurors heard closing arguments from both prosecutors and defence lawyers before retiring briefly to consider their verdict yesterday. They deliberated for less than two hours.

Matar was found guilty of stabbing Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade that had been shown to witnesses and the court.

The defendant shouted pro-Palestinian slogans on several occasions during the trial.

Free speech v. blasphemy

Matar, from New Jersey, previously told media he had only read two pages of The Satanic Verses but believed the author had “attacked Islam.”

After the novel was published in 1988, Rushdie became the centre of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable in any circumstance.

Books and bookshops were torched, his Japanese translator was murdered, and his Norwegian publisher was shot several times.

Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for a decade after the 1989 fatwa, but for the past 20 years — until the attack — he lived relatively normally in New York.

Last year, he published a memoir called Knife in which he recounted the near-death experience.

The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye was severed, and he told the court that “it was decided the eye would be stitched shut to allow it to moisturise. It was quite a painful operation—which I don’t recommend.”

Asked to describe the intensity of the pain over the attack, he said it was “a 10” out of 10.

His Adam’s apple was also lacerated, his liver and small bowel penetrated, and severe nerve damage to his arm left him paralysed in one hand.

“The first thing I said on regaining the ability of speech was ‘I can speak’,” he said to stifled laughter from jurors.

British-American Rushdie, now 77, was rescued from Matar by bystanders.

Venue employee Jordan Steves had told the court how he launched himself “with my right shoulder with as much force as I could manage” to help others subdue the suspect.

He pointed to Matar, sitting just feet away in the ornate courtroom, when asked to identify the attacker.

Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militant organisation Hezbollah endorsed the fatwa on Rushdie, the FBI has said, and Matar faces a separate prosecution in US federal court on terrorism charges.

Iran has denied any link to the attacker and said only Rushdie was to blame for the incident. — AFP