Matar was found guilty of attempted murder in the second degree for his attack on the famous novelist.
Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed and partially blinded the awarded novelist Salman Rushdie during an event in New York, was found guilty of attempted murder.
The jurors returned the verdict on Friday for the assault of Matar on Rushdie on stage during an event of an Arts Institute in August 2022.
The author of the Satanic verses, 77, was stabbed with a knife several times in the head, neck, chest and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his liver and intestine, and requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.
Matar, 27, can be seen in videos of the attack that rushed on the scene of the Chautauqua institution while Rushdie was presented to the public to speak of keeping the writers out of damage. Some videos have been shown at the jury during the seven days of testimony.
Matar was found guilty of attempted murder in the second degree as well as assault in the second degree for having stabbed Henry Reese, co -founder of the city of asylum of Pittsburgh, a non -profit group that helps the writers exiled, which leads the conversation with Rushdie who morning.
He will be sentenced on April 23 and risks up to 25 years in prison.
Nathaniel Barone, a public defender representing Matar, said that his client was disappointed by the verdict.
“The video, I think, was extremely prejudicial to Mr. Matar,” said Barone outside the courtroom, referring to a video of the attack that has been shown several times to the jurors. “It’s this old expression: an image is worth a thousand words.”
While he was taken out of the courtroom in the handcuffs, Matar discreetly pronounced the “free Palestine”, echoing the comments he frequently made when entering and released the trial.
British American, based in New York, Rushdie, an atheist born in a Muslim cashmere family in India, has faced death threats since the publication of his novel in 1988, The Satanic Verses, which Ayatollah Khomeini, then the supreme chief of Iran, denounced as blasphemous.
After the knife assault, the Lebanese American Matar told the New York Post that he had attacked Rushdie because he had attacked Islam.
Matar also faces federal accusations carried by prosecutors, accusing him of having tried to kill Rushdie as an act of terrorism and to provide material support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the United States designates as a terrorist organization. Hezbollah had approved Khomeini’s Fatwa against Rushdie.
Matar has to face these accusations during a separate test in Buffalo.
