Man accused of trying to murder Salman Rushdie says 'Free Palestine' as he is led into court

10 February 2025, 21:37

The man accused of trying to murder Salman Rushdie said "free Palestine" as he entered a US courtroom on Monday.

Hadi Matar was heard to shout the slogan ahead of the opening day of his trial as witnesses gave testimony for the first time.

Matar, 27, of Fairview, New Jersey, is charged with attempted murder and assault. He has pleaded not guilty.

Prosecutors at Chautauqua County Court in New York state on Monday said that the 2022 attack was "so fast and came so unexpectedly that Mr Rushdie continued to sit in his chair after his attacker inflicted the first few stab wounds."

The author, who wrote Midnight's Children and Victory City, had been about to speak about keeping writers safe from harm in August 2022 when Matar ran toward him on the stage at the Chautauqua Institution Amphitheatre.

Matar stabbed Sir Salman more than a dozen times in the neck, stomach, chest, hand and right eye, leaving him partially blind and with permanent damage to one hand.

Prosecutor Jason Schmidt told the court that Matar "very deliberately, forcefully and efficiently with speed plunged the knife into Mr Rushdie over and over and over and over again”.

Attendees rushed the stage and "tackled the attacker, subduing him… within a couple seconds of the attack," the prosecutor said.

Meanwhile Mr Rushdie had been stabbed straight through the right eye severing the optic nerve”., blinding him and "lay on the ground bleeding out”.

The famed novelist went into "haemorrhagic shock… he lost so much blood that his heart couldn’t keep up with the volume of the remaining blood”.

Matar came close to committing murder, the prosecutors said, as given “the knife penetration of [the] liver and the wound to his small bowel… any one of these conditions could have killed Mr Rushdie had he not received level one trauma care when he did".

Mr Rushdie, 77, is later expected to give evidence during the trial, bringing the writer face-to-face with his alleged attacker for the first time in more than two years.

The Indian-born British-American author detailed the attack and his long, painful recovery in a memoir, Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder, released last year.

A jury was selected last week.

The accused was in court throughout the three-day process, taking notes and consulting with his legal team.

The trial is expected to last up to 10 days.

Jurors will be shown video and photos from the day of the alleged attack, which ended when onlookers rushed Matar and held him until police arrived.

The event's moderator, Henry Reese, co-founder of City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, was also injured.

Matar told investigators he travelled by bus to Chautauqua, about 75 miles south of Buffalo. He is believed to have slept in the grounds of the arts and academic retreat the night before the attack.

In a separate indictment, federal authorities allege Matar was motivated by a terrorist organisation's endorsement of a fatwa, or edict, calling for Sir Salman's death.

A later trial on the federal charges - terrorism transcending national boundaries, providing material support to terrorists and attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organisation - will be scheduled in US District Court in Buffalo.

Sir Salman spent years in hiding after the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 over the novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.

In the US federal indictment, authorities allege Matar believed the edict was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group's then-leader, Hassan Nasrallah.