Prosecutors to lay out attempted murder case against man accused of Salman Rushdie attack Hadi Matar has pleaded not guilty to attacking the British author with a knife while he was on stage at a festival in 2022.
Prosecutors are to lay out their framework of their case against Hadi Matar, the man accused of attacking author Salman Rushdie, on Monday in a case that has attracted the world’s media to the small town of Mayville in western New York state.
In a jailhouse interview soon after he was detained, Matar told the New York Post he had only read two pages of Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses, which initiated a fatwa against the author issued by Iran’s then-leader Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989.
Rushdie, who lived with security protection in London for decade before moving to New York to live under less constrained circumstances, wrote in Knife, a meditative account of the attack, that he does not regret the earlier novel.
Jurors in Chautauqua county court will hear that Matar, from Fairview, New Jersey, allegedly staked out the Chautauqua Institution ahead of Rushdie’s visit.
