Salman Rushdie Attacker Found Guilty of Attempted Murder

The man who tried to stab Salman Rushdie, leaving the author partially blind, was found guilty of attempted murder Friday, Feb. 21, ABC News reports.

The jury deliberated for under two hours before returning the conviction for 27-year-old Hadi Matar. He was found guilty of second-degree attempted murder, as well as assault for injuries inflicted on Ralph Henry Reese. Matar will be sentenced on April 23 and faces up to 32 years in prison.

A lawyer for Matar, as well as a rep for Rushdie, did not immediately return requests for comment. 

Rushdie was giving a lecture at New York’s Chautauqua Institution on Aug. 12, 2022, when Matar stormed the stage and stabbed the author more than a dozen times, blinding him in one eye. During closing arguments, prosecutors described the incident as a deliberate, targeted attack and claimed Matar meant to kill Rushdie.

Matar’s defense attorney, meanwhile, claimed his client was stirred up by Rushdie celebrity but said the attack was more of an outburst than a deliberate murder attempt. He noted Matar’s use of a knife, rather than a gun or bomb, and noted Matar did not strike Rushdie’s vital organs.

Rushdie testified during the trial, too, recalling the attack in great detail, including a stab wound in his eye that was “intensely painful.” At one point, he said, “It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought” (via The Associated Press).

Along with the state criminal case, Matar is also facing federal terrorism charges after a grand jury indicted him on three counts last July (he has pleaded not guilty). The federal indictment came down after Matar rejected a plea deal that would’ve covered both the state and federal cases and seen him serve a concurrent sentence of between 30 to 40 years in prison. 

The federal case against Matar also notably ties the attack back to the infamous fatwa that Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued against Rushdie in 1989 over his depiction of the prophet Muhammad in The Satanic Verses. The federal indictment alleges that Matar was partly motivated to attack Rushdie after watching a 2006 speech from a Hezbollah leader endorsing the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s death.