A man accused of attacking Salman Rushdie while he was introduced to a New York State literary literature in 2022 was going to trial this week in a case that was likely to create global titles.
The trial could climb life in Mayville’s little New York village, whose population of less than 1,500 is not accustomed to finding itself amid a media circus covering the attempt to kill one of most popular writers in the world.
Hadi Matar, 26, of New Jersey, was accused of attempting to kill and attack on Chautauqua, allegedly stabbed in the set of 10 times, in the stomach and neck. Rushdie eventually disappeared in one eye and sustainable damage to the nerves and liver.
The trial, beginning on Tuesday with the selection of the jury, was postponed from January 2023, when Matar’s defense team requested Rushdie’s Memoir Knife manuscript: Reflects after a murder attempt, and again in October, after Matar’s defense will appeal for a change of place, the dispute that a neutral jury of Matar’s peers is not located in the Chautauqua county.
The author has credited a series of “man-made” for the survivor of the attack.
“There was a slash right on my neck here, but it didn’t seem to cut the artery … There were three stab wounds in the middle of my body, but they didn’t get the heart,” he told CBC Radio’s The Current. “That’s what we call good luck.”
After refusing a plea for a 20-year sentence, Matar also faced charges related to federal terrorism, including providing “material support and resources” to Iran’s supported group Hezbollah .
Prosecutors in the federal case argue that Matar’s attack was not random but that was a fatwa, or death threatening, issued by the Iranian leadership against Rushdie in the 1988 novel The Satan verses, which Many Muslims are considered to be attracted.
Rushdie spent many years of hiding after the fatwa was issued in 1989, but began to reemerge in the late 1990s. He has traveled freely for the past two decades and has become a frequent fixture in the circuit circuit and television shows.
Matar, who was born in the US but holding dual citizenship in Lebanon, demanded that he did not guilty on the same charges, and was held without bail in the Chautauqua County Jail. Her mother indicated that she was radicalized on a trip to see her father in Lebanon in 2018.
Rushdie, 77, and Henry Reese, who founded the city of Asylum of Pittsburgh to provide sanctuary to writers who were deported under the threat of persecution, and who Rushdie credited in helping to save his Life, expected to testify.
But the prosecutors of the matar test said the jurors were unlikely to hear about the fatwa. “We’re not going there,” district attorney Jason Schmidt said at a recent hearing.
Schmidt said the presentation of a motive was not necessary because the attack was witnessed and recorded on the cellphones of the members of the audience.
Schmidt had earlier told reporters that his “largest hurdle” had selected a fair and impartial jury because of the level of publicity surrounding the incident. Matar’s lawyer Nathan Barone, told the court that he was afraid of the current global chaos to influence their emotions to his client.
“We remember that there may be prejudicial feelings in the community,” said Barone, who also sought a change of place for the trial. In the tensions around the violence that motivated the religion that was running high, the judge in the case ordered both parties to avoid media statements.
In an interview with the Rochester Post-Journal, Barone said he had concerns about the “natural and implicit bias” to the American Arabs and the Muslim or Arab American community in Chautauqua County.
“There’s a segment of the population that looks at them or hears about them and they make up a stereotype,” said Barone, adding that he wanted to see the trial move to one of the Bureau of New York City or Erie County , where there is a larger Arab American population.
After his arrest, Matar interviewed the New York Post where he described the bus to Buffalo from his home in Fairlawn, New Jersey, and a Lyft in Chautauqua, 40 miles away. He bought after a festival ticket and slept outside the night before Rushdie’s conversation.
“I don’t like people. I don’t think he’s a very good person, “Matar told the newspaper.” He was a man who attacked Islam. He attacked their beliefs, the belief systems. “Matar also praised the late Iran leader Ayatollah Khomeini as” a great man “but would not say if he followed Khomeini’s fatwa.
Nasser Kanaanin, a spokesman for Iran’s foreign ministry, Tehran said he was not involved. “We do not consider anyone worthy to blame, blame or even condemn, other than [Rushdie] himself and his supporters. In this regard, there is no blame in the Islamic Republic of Iran. “
Kaani added: “We believe that the insults made and the support he received were an insult against the followers of all religions.”
Ron Kuby, who represents Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Cleric who leads Egypt-based militant group Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya, said it was no surprise that Matar refused to contact the Prosecutors.
“I hope he thought he would be killed in the course of this attack so he was low. He was fortunate enough to survive so he would probably continue to fight within the court and in prison,” he said.
Kuby said she wondered if Matar would choose a traditional defense by trying to create a rational doubt and challenge the witnesses to the witness or rather talk about her motives behind the attack.
“Is he or his lawyer will wear a more ideological or religious inspiration defense and talk about religious values that motivate him to try to kill Rushdie, the Satan verses, and try to put a political defense? ” Said Kuby.
In the knife, Rushdie himself described the attack clearly, writing, “Death will come to me … It struck me as anachronistic”, and described his alleged assailant as “a type of time journey, a deadly that ghost from the past ”.
Rushdie’s court collision and the alleged attack were likely to be amazing, especially if Matar tried to justify the trial of attacking the writer for the offense caused by his work.
“Matar tried to do this at that day that day, and could continue to do so in court even if it results in his convincing,” Kuby said. “Sometimes people prefer to get a belief than to give up their convincing.”
