Salman Rushdie recounts brutal 2022 stabbing attack at Hadi Matar’s federal terrorism trial
Salman Rushdie gave emotional testimony at Hadi Matar's federal terrorism trial, recounting the 2022 knife attack that cost him his right eye. Prosecutors allege Matar acted in support of Hezbollah, while the defence argues he acted alone.
New York: Author Salman Rushdie has given a chilling account of the attack that felled him on a stage at a literary meeting and cost him his right eye.
“It was an enormous and expansive lake of blood,” he said while testifying on Thursday at the federal terrorism trial of the assailant Hadi Matar.
Rushdie narrated the chilling account of the blind fury he faced as stabbings rained on him. Knocked to the floor, he said, “I was on the stage, lying down, with an enormous pool of blood all around me”.
“I tried to get away, but he was on top of me, stabbing away,” he said.
Matar, who was convicted in a New York State court of attempting to murder Rushdie in 2022, is now on trial at the federal court in Buffalo, charged with transnational terrorism.
In the US legal system, there are separate state and federal laws, and a person can be tried separately under the two sets of laws for the same incident.
Matar is serving a 25-year sentence that was handed him by the state court last year, and if he is convicted of the federal terrorism charges, he could face life in prison.
A US citizen of Lebanese descent, Matar, 28, attacked Rushdie in an attempt to carry out the fatwa issued by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989 demanding Rushdie’s death because his novel, “Satanic Verses”, was considered blasphemous, assistant federal prosecutor Timothy Lynch told the court on Wednesday when the trial began.
After the fatwa was issued, Rushdie, a Booker Prize winner, went underground with British government protection.
A decade later, he emerged in public and lives in New York City, where he is a professor at a university.
Rushdie, 79, was participating in a literary programme at the Chautauqua Institution, a literary and arts centre about 600 kilometres from the city, and, ironically, was to speak on the protection of writers when he was attacked.
He has written a book about the incident, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”.
Lynch asked Rushdie to remove the special glasses that he wears so the jurors can see the missing eye.
Rushdie said that besides damaging his eye, the stabbings damaged his left hand, and he could not drive any more, and his liver was injured.
When they filed the charges last year, prosecutors said that between September 2020 and August 2022, when the attack took place, Matar attempted to provide material support and resources to Hezbollah.
To rebut the terrorism charge, Matar’s lawyer Nathaniel Barone has said that he was acting alone as an enraged Muslim and not on behalf of Hezbollah or anyone else.
Barone asked Rushdie if he should have expected to be attacked by Islamic extremists because of his book, “The Satanic Verses”.
Rushdie curtly dismissed the line of questioning, saying, “I don’t believe the book is on trial. Somebody else is on trial.”
