‘Dangerously close to committing murder’: Court hears details of attack on Salman Rushdie

London: Sir Salman Rushdie did not initially realise he was the victim of a frenzied stabbing because his assailant launched the attack “so fast” and “so unexpectedly”, a court heard.

The Booker Prize winning novelist, 77, was stabbed more than a dozen times as he prepared to deliver a lecture in upstate New York on author safety on August 12, 2022.

Author Salman Rushdie in Berlin in May 2024 while promoting his book about the attack.Credit: AP

The bloody 27-second attack nearly killed The Satanic Verses author, who was left blind in his right eye and with damage to his hand and liver.

District Attorney Jason Schmidt, told Chautauqua County Court, in New York state, that the “suddenness of the attack” launched by defendant Hadi Matar meant Rushdie did not initially react.

He said the assault came “so fast and came so unexpectedly that Rushdie continued to sit in his chair after his attacker inflicted the first few stab wounds”.

“It all happened so fast that even the person under attack and [Henry] Reese didn’t even register what was happening”. Reese was hired to moderate the talk.

Hadi Matar, charged with severely injuring Salman Rushdie in a 2022 knife attack, in court last week.Credit: AP

‘Matar came dangerously close to committing murder’

The attack came more than three decades after Ayatollah Khomeini, the former Iranian supreme leader, issued a fatwa calling for his execution over The Satanic Verses, which he deemed blasphemous to the prophet Muhammad. A multimillion-dollar bounty was placed on Rushdie’s head.

Matar, who has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and assault, said “free Palestine” as he entered the court on Monday (Tuesday AEDT) wearing an untucked blue shirt.

He sat at the defence table staring at a yellow legal pad, occasionally taking notes or muttering to his lawyers.

Schmidt said Matar had come “dangerously close to committing murder” during the attack, as he repeatedly stabbed Rushdie until Reese and “good Samaritans” in the audience intervened.

The district attorney said Matar “was seemingly on a mission in the uninterrupted direct and rapid manner” of the way he conducted the attack. He had attacked the author “intentionally” and his objective “was to cause Rushdie’s death”.

Matar used a handrail at the side of the stage to “launch himself up” before he “accelerated into a full-out run directly to where Rushdie was seated”, Schmidt said.

He said Matar approached the stage and “without hesitation upon reaching Rushdie, this man very deliberately, forcefully and efficiently with speed plunged the knife into Rushdie over and over and over and over again”.

He then “withdrew his right hand” which was holding the knife and stabbed Rushdie repeatedly in the torso, hand, throat and thigh.

Matar was stopped by Reese and others who “tackled the attacker, subduing him … within a couple of seconds of the attack”.

Schmidt said Rushdie “lay on the ground bleeding out” and “had been stabbed straight through the right eye severing the optic nerve”.

He added that Rushdie was losing blood so rapidly that when he arrived at hospital he was in “haemorrhagic shock … he lost so much blood that his heart couldn’t keep up with the volume of the remaining blood”.

He said “the knife penetration of his liver and the wound to his small bowel… any one of these conditions could have killed Rushdie had he not received level-one trauma care when he did”.

‘Something terrible has happened’

Deborah Moore Kushmaul, the chief program officer of the Chautauqua Institution, said she began to approach the stage on the morning Rushdie was stabbed after hearing a “commotion”.

“The amphitheatre became full of sound, and in the first seconds I heard it I wasn’t sure if it was screaming or laughing or both,” she said.

Moore Kushmaul said she soon “knew something terrible had happened” when she saw a lot of blood and people “piled” on the stage in the aftermath of the attack.

Hadi Matar, at left, is escorted from the stage as people tend to author Salman Rushdie, centre right, at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, NY, on August 12, 2022.Credit: AP

Rushdie was lying on the stage, she said, and people “had their hands very close” to his neck.

She said she saw others “trying to restrain the attacker”.

She was then given the knife used by Matar by someone she referred to as “the reverend”. She said it was a “dark silver” knife and the blade was around the same size as the handle.

Knives were discovered in Matar’s black backpack, along with a fake ID and a visa card bearing his real name.

Rushdie ‘covered in blood’

Jordan Steves, the second witness called by the prosecution, described how he helped tackle Rushdie’s assailant in a bid to disrupt the attack.

Steves, the chairman for education at the Chautauqua Institution, said he pulled open the stage door and ran towards the attack when he saw arms violently “swinging” on a live feed of the event.

“I picked out the one I thought was the assailant and I ran as fast as I could,” he said. He then began to lower his right shoulder “with as much force as I could manage” onto the attacker’s body.

He said Rushdie was “gravely wounded” and “covered in blood”.

Author Salman Rushdie is tended to after being attacked during a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution.Credit: AP

Schmidt said Rushdie would be called to give evidence during the trial. Doing so would bring the author face to face with his assailant for the first time since the attack.

Jurors are also expected to be shown a video of the attack, as well as hear testimony from Reese and Rushdie’s trauma surgeon.

Schmidt said part of the case would be based on Matar’s own comments to a state trooper following the attack.

‘Case not an Agatha Christie novel’

Assistant public defender Lynn Schaffer told the jury the case was not a “whodunnit” or an “Agatha Christie novel”.

Delivering the defence’s opening statement because Matar’s lead lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, was unwell, Schaffer said the “prosecution will want you to believe this is straightforward … open and shut”.

She said: “The elements of a crime are more than just something really bad happened ... Something bad did happen, something very bad did happen, but the DA has to prove something more than that, and something much more specific than that.”

Schaffer suggested that the guest passes for the Chautauqua Institute found in Matar’s backpack were “reflective of an intent to come and watch a lecture, come and watch a show”.

She said an officer initially thought he was “watching a scuffle unfold”.

Matar, who moved to New Jersey from Lebanon as a child, had been in Chautauqua several nights before the attack, having travelled there after seeing Rushdie’s talk advertised on Twitter. He used a fake ID bearing the name of a former top Hezbollah commander.

In previous comments to the New York Post, Matar voiced his dislike for Rushdie who he claimed had “attacked Islam” and was “disingenuous”.

Rushdie spent a decade in hiding after the fatwa was issued for his 1988 novel before reintegrating into public life. He moved to New York in 2000 and lived freely.

The trial continues.

The Telegraph, London

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