The trial of the man accused of stabbing Indian-origin British writer Salman Rushdie in 2022 has been postponed after the judge overseeing the case ruled that the alleged attacker has the right to read the author's memoirs read the incident, which will be published in April.
David Foley, a judge in New York's Chautauqua County, indicated on Tuesday that Hadi Matar, 26, had the right to access the manuscript and all related materials to prepare his defense. However, since the volume has not yet been published, Foley had left it to Matar's attorney, Nathaniel Barone, to decide whether he should wait until the book was available.
Finally, this Wednesday, Foley announced the postponement of the trial that was supposed to begin next week. Jury selection was scheduled to begin on Monday, January 8th.
The delay will allow Matar's lawyers to request delivery of “certain materials underlying the proposed publication of Mr. Rushdie's book,” according to prosecutor Jason Schmidt, who is handling the case. Schmidt had asked the publisher for a copy of the volume, which was refused on intellectual property grounds.
The prosecutor downplayed the postponement and assured that it would have no impact on the outcome of the trial. He also does not believe that the existence of the work will have much influence on the development of the hearing, since the attack was carried out publicly in front of a large audience and there are numerous eyewitnesses – and recordings – of the event.
“It’s not just the book,” Barone told the AP. “I will have every little note that Rushdie wrote, I have the right. Every conversation, every recording, everything I did had to do with this book.”
The volume, titled “Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder,” will go on sale April 16, according to Penguin, its publisher. Rushdie announced in October that he was working on this work; At this point, preparations for the trial were already underway.
Rushdie was scheduled to give a lecture in Chautauqua on August 12, 2022, when a man approached the stage and stabbed the author of “The Satanic Verses” a dozen times in the neck, stomach, thigh, chest and eye. The writer was in the hospital for a month and a half and ultimately lost the vision in his right eye and the feeling of touch in several fingers of his left hand.
In an interview with the New York Post after his arrest, Matar claimed that Rushdie had “attacked Islam” and praised the late Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini. The Ayatollah issued a fatwa, an Islamic edict, in 1989 calling for the author's death as a blasphemer after he wrote “The Satanic Verses.”
This verdict forced Rushdie to live in secret and under the protection of Scotland Yard for years, although he was able to travel freely for the past two decades after Khomeini's death.
Matar has dual citizenship: the United States, the country where he was born, and Lebanon, where his parents are from. His mother stated that after visiting his father in the Arab country in 2018, the young man changed and became more introverted and moody.
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