Rushdie, who has faced decades-old death threats, was about to speak on writers’ safety when he was slashed 15 times in front of a stunned audience.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The attack left him gravely wounded, and he lost sight in his right eye.<\/p>\n
Matar declines to testify<\/p>\n
Prosecutors asserted that Matar was motivated by the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khamenei’s 1989 call for Rushdie’s death because of his book The Satanic Verses.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Defence lawyer Nathaniel Barone countered that the government had no proof of what was going through Matar’s mind.<\/p>\n
Matar himself declined to testify, but Rushdie did, telling jurors, “I can’t say what his ambitions or his aim was, but the wounds were dispersed across my body.”<\/p>\n
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Rushdie testified telling jurors “the wounds were dispersed across my body”. (Reuters: Fabrizio Bensch)<\/p>\n
The Satanic Verses, a novel about the lives and dreams of two actors who survive a plane explosion, was published in 1988.<\/p>\n
It drew critical acclaim in the United Kingdom but engendered protests around the Muslim world over what some believers saw as blasphemous suggestions about Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, particularly in a dream sequence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim family, has said the dream sequence was just that. But he went into hiding for years, gradually emerging after Iran’s government distanced itself in 1998 from Khamenei’s fatwa, or religious edict.<\/p>\n
“For two decades or more, I led a public life without a hint of trouble”, Rushdie testified at the trial in Buffalo, New York.<\/p>\n
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Yet the fatwa was never rescinded; indeed, Khamenei’s successor, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicated in 2017 that it remained in effect.\u00a0<\/p>\n
An Iranian foundation has offered a more than $3 million bounty for killing Rushdie.<\/p>\n
Matar’s messages showed him zeroing in on Rushdie<\/p>\n
Matar repeatedly broached the fatwa with contacts in messaging apps in 2021 and 2022, according to exhibits shown in court.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The messages showed Matar felt Rushdie had attacked Islam and, by surviving, emboldened others to insult the faith.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Matar alluded to a 2006 comment along those lines by the late Hezbollah militant group leader Hassan Nasrallah, the messages showed.<\/p>\n