Trial of man charged with stabbing Salman Rushdie hears closing arguments

Lawyers in the US have delivered their closing arguments in the trial of a New Jersey man charged with trying to kill Salman Rushdie on a New York lecture stage in a knife attack that left the author blind in one eye and with other serious injuries.

Hadi Matar, 27, is charged with attempted murder and assault in the August 2022 attack at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.

He faces up to 25 years in prison if convicted.

“I want you to look at the unprovoked nature of this attack,” Mr Schmidt said.

“I want you to look at the targeted nature of the attack. There were a lot of people around that day but there was only one person who was targeted.”

Assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors have not proved that Matar intended to kill Mr Rushdie.

“You will agree something bad happened to Mr Rushdie, but you don’t know what Mr Matar’s conscious objective was,” Mr Brautigan said.

“The testimony you have heard doesn’t establish anything more than a chaotic noisy outburst that occurred that injured Mr Rushdie.”

Mr Schmidt said while it is not possible to read Matar’s mind, “it’s foreseeable that if you’re going to stab someone 10 or 15 times about the face and neck, it’s going to result in a fatality”.

Mr Rushdie, 77, was the key witness during testimony that began last week.

The Booker Prize-winning author told jurors he thought he was dying when a masked stranger ran onto the stage and stabbed and slashed at him until being tackled by bystanders.

Mr Rushdie showed jurors his now-blinded right eye, usually hidden behind a darkened eyeglass lens.

He also slowed down video showing Matar approaching the seated Mr Rushdie from behind and reaching around him to stab at his torso with a knife.

Mr Rushdie raises his arms and rises from his seat, walking and stumbling for a few steps with Matar hanging on, swinging and stabbing until they both fall and are surrounded by onlookers who rush in to separate them.

Mr Rushdie is seen flailing on the ground, waving a hand covered in bright red blood.

Mr Schmidt freezes on a frame showing Rushdie, his face also bloodied, as he is surrounded by people.

“We’ve shown you intent,” Mr Schmidt said.

The recordings also picked up the gasps and screams from audience members who had been seated to hear Mr Rushdie speak with City of Asylum Pittsburgh founder Henry Reese about keeping writers safe.

Mr Reese suffered a gash to his forehead, resulting in the assault charge.

He detailed his long and painful recovery in his 2024 memoir, “Knife”.

Throughout the trial, Matar often took notes with a pen and sometimes laughed or smiled with defence lawyers during breaks in testimony.

His lawyers declined to call any witnesses of their own and Matar did not give evidence in his defence.

Instead, the lawyers challenged prosecution witnesses as part of a strategy intended to cast doubt on whether Matar intended to kill, and not just injure, Mr Rushdie.

The distinction is important for an attempted murder conviction.

Matar had with him knives, not a gun or bomb, his lawyers said.

And Mr Rushdie’s heart and lungs were uninjured, they noted in response to testimony that the injuries were life-threatening.

Public defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar likely would have faced a lesser charge of assault were it not for Mr Rushdie’s celebrity.

“We think that it became an attempted murder because of the notoriety of the alleged victim in the case,” Mr Barone told reporters after testimony concluded on Thursday.

“That’s been it from the very beginning. It’s been nothing more, nothing less. And it’s for publicity purposes. It’s for self-interest purposes.”

A separate federal indictment alleges that Matar, of Fairview, New Jersey, was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Mr Rushdie’s death.

Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses”, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.

Mr Rushdie spent years in hiding, but after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he had travelled freely over the past quarter century.

A trial on the terrorism-related charges will be scheduled in US District Court in Buffalo.