Man convicted of attempted murder in attack on Salman Rushdie

Nathaniel Barone, a public defender representing Matar, said his client was disappointed by the verdict.

“The video, I think, was extremely damaging to Mr Matar,” Barone said outside the courtroom, referring to video of the attack that was shown repeatedly to jurors, sometimes in slow motion.

“It’s that old expression, a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Rushdie, an atheist born into a Muslim Kashmiri family in India, has faced death threats since the 1988 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses, which Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, denounced as blasphemous.

After the knife assault, Matar told the New York Post that he had travelled from his home in New Jersey after seeing the Rushdie event advertised because he disliked the novelist, saying Rushdie had attacked Islam.

Matar, a dual citizen of his native US and Lebanon, said in the interview that he was surprised Rushdie had survived, the Post reported.

Matar did not testify at his trial. His lawyers told jurors that the prosecutors had not proved beyond reasonable doubt the necessary criminal intent to kill needed for a conviction of attempted murder, and argued that he should have been charged with assault.

Matar also faces federal charges brought by prosecutors in the US attorney’s office in western New York, accusing him of attempting to murder Rushdie as an act of terrorism and of providing material support to the armed group Hezbollah in Lebanon, which the US has designated as a terrorist organisation.

Matar is due to face those charges at a separate trial in Buffalo.

Reuters