Man Found Guilty of Trying to Kill Salman Rushdie

An American-Lebanese man was found guilty on Friday of attempting to kill novelist Salman Rushdie when storming a stage and repeatedly plunging a knife into the "Satanic Verses" author.

- Agence France-Presse

NEW YORK:

Hadi Matar faces up to 25 years in prison and will be sentenced in April after being convicted of attempted murder and assault charges over the 2022 attack.

Matar's legal team had sought to prevent witnesses from characterizing Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran's 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in "The Satanic Verses".

Rushdie had told jurors of Matar "stabbing and slashing" him during an event at an upscale cultural center in rural New York.

"It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain," Rushdie said, adding he was left in a "lake of blood".

He said it "occurred to me I was dying" before he was helicoptered to a trauma hospital.