The trial of Hadi Matar, who stabbed Salman Rushdie in 2022, has begun. Matar faces both state and federal charges. Rushdie has spoken publicly about the attack and its lasting effects.
Salman Rushdie presented his book, Knife, at El Ateneo Library in Madrid, Spain, on May 20, 2024. This event occurred as a trial began for Hadi Matar, the man accused of violently stabbing Rushdie onstage at a literary event in 2022. The attack left the British author permanently blind in one eye. Lawyers for both Rushdie and Matar delivered opening statements inside the Chautauqua County Courthouse in Mayville, N.Y. on Monday.
In August 2022, Rushdie was poised to speak at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York when a man, later identified as Matar, ran to the stage and repeatedly stabbed the author. Matar was soon arrested. Two years later, federal authorities accused Matar of engaging with Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group in Lebanon, which is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S. Federal authorities allege that Matar provided 'material support and resources' to Hezbollah starting in September 2020, in an attempt to carry out a fatwa on Rushdie calling for his assassination, issued by Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. Rushdie spent much of his life in hiding as a result. After the Ayatollah died in 1998, the Iranian government stepped back from the fatwa.According to the indictment, Matar was partly motivated by a 2006 speech from Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah endorsing the fatwa. The terrorism-related federal charges are separate from the murder and assault charges. Both trials are ongoing. Matar could face life in prison for the terrorism offenses alone, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Western District of New York. In a previous interview with NPR, Rushdie detailed his near-death experience and the toll it took on him physically and mentally. In an interview with NPR's 'I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing towards me was, so it's you. Here you are,' he said last April. 'This was my second thought. Why now? Really? It's been so long. Why now after all these years?' He added.
SALMAN RUSHDIE HADI MATAR KNIFE ATTACK TRIAL HEZBOLLAH FATWA AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI CHAUTAUQUA INSTITUTION
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