Prosecutors are to put out their framework of their case towards Hadi Matar, the person accused of attacking writer Salman Rushdie, on Monday in a case that has attracted the world’s media to the small city of Mayville in western New York state.
Matar, a 27-year-old Lebanese-American, is dealing with prices of tried homicide and assault within the stabbing assault on the writer on stage at an arts competition in August 2022. The 77-year-old Rushdie was grievously injured within the assault and misplaced sight in a single eye.
Jurors in Chautauqua county court docket will hear that Matar, from Fairview, New Jersey, allegedly staked out the Chautauqua Establishment forward of Rushdie’s go to. Prosecutors will in all probability deal with circumstances of the assault and never the alleged assailant’s non secular motivations.
In a jailhouse interview quickly after he was detained, Matar informed the New York Publish he had solely learn two pages of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which initiated a fatwa towards the writer issued by Iran’s then-leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.
Matar, who has pleaded not responsible and can be tried on federal terrorism-related prices at a later date, informed the outlet that he believed Rushdie had “attacked Islam.”
Rushdie, who lived with safety safety in London for decade earlier than transferring to New York to stay beneath much less constrained circumstances, wrote in Knife, a meditative account of the assault, that he doesn’t remorse the sooner novel.
“I’m happy with the work I’ve executed, and that very a lot consists of The Satanic Verses. If anybody’s searching for regret, you’ll be able to cease studying proper right here,” he wrote.
However forward of the incident, he dreamed of being attacked by a gladiator with a spear in a Roman amphitheater. He later stated he thought, “Don’t be foolish. It’s a dream.”
However he additionally questioned his obvious passivity beneath the violent onslaught.
“Why didn’t I combat? Why didn’t I run? I simply stood there like a pinata and let him smash me,” Rushdie wrote in Knife. “It didn’t really feel dramatic, or notably terrible. It simply felt possible … matter-of-fact.”
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