Matar’s defense team asked for a delay in the trial after Matar’s lead public lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, was taken ill. Assistant public defender Lynn Schaffer told jurors that prosecutors would be unable to prove Matar’s guilt, even using video recordings and photos.
The encounter in Judge David Foley’s courtroom will bring Rushdie and Matar together for the first time since, prosecutors say, Matar dropped a bag containing assorted knives in his left hand as he approached the stage at the Chautauqua Institution amphitheater, and stabbed the author more than a dozen times with a 10in knife in his right.
Salman Rushdie set to testify in trial of man accused of trying to murder him Author, 77, to take stand in trial of Hadi Matar, 27, after prosecution alleges suspect came close to killing him.
Rushdie, 77, has agreed to testify for prosecution against Hadi Matar, 27, the man accused of assaulting him with a knife as he was about to address an open-air audience on a theme of shelter and home.
Salman Rushdie is expected to take the stand in the trial of the man accused of attempting to kill him at a literary gathering in western New York in August 2022, more than 35 years after he was first placed under a death warrant by Iranian religious leaders.
