Jurors will be shown photos and videos from the day of the 2022 attack, when a man rushed onstage at a literary conference in New York and attacked acclaimed novelist Salman Rushdie.
The trial of the man who viciously stabbed novelist Salman Rushdie on a stage in New York in 2022, leaving him partially blind in one eye, began Monday at a county court in New York.
The attacker, 24-year-old Hadi M, has been charged with second-degree attempted murder and second-degree assault for stabbing Rushdie more than a dozen times. He has pleaded not guilty.
A jury was selected last week and the assailant was in court throughout the three-day process, taking notes and consulting with his attorneys.
Once testimony is underway, the trial is expected last a week to 10 days.
Trial to bring Rushdie face-to-face with attacker
The trial is set to bring Rushdie, 77, face-to-face with his assailant for the first time in more than 2 years.
The assailant stabbed Rushdie many times in the abdomen and the neck, even as police officers tried to hold him back.
The attack took place before a crowd of thousands of people gathered at a literary conference at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.
A bloody Rushdie was flown to the hospital and was in surgery for several hours. The attack left him with permanent damage to one hand, and internal injuries.
Rushdie was due to speak about keeping writers safe
Rushdie had spent many years in hiding following a fatwa, a call to death, that was imposed on him by Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989.
Rushdie’s book, The Satanic Verses, was labeled blasphemous by the Iranian leadership. The death threat forced the writer to go into hiding.
Rushdie, an Indian-born British-American novelist, however, gradually began making public appearances in New York City.
He was due to speak at the New York conference about keeping writers safe from harm in August 2022, when the assailant attacked him.
Rushdie wrote about surviving the attempted assassination in a memoir “Knife: Meditations After and Attempted Murder,” released last year.
A separate federal indictment charges Hadi M. with terrorism, alleging he was attempting to carry out a fatwa.
