Salman Rushdie could confront man charged with stabbing him when trial begins

MAYVILLE, N.Y. — Author Salman Rushdie could take the stand towards the man charged with many times stabbing him prior to a lecture when the defendant is going on trial early subsequent 12 months, a prosecutor mentioned Friday.

“He is on the people’s witness list right now heading into trial,” Chautauqua County District Attorney Jason Schmidt mentioned, following a courtroom listening to during which the pass judgement on scheduled the trial for Jan. 8.

Hadi Matar, 25, has pleaded no longer accountable to fees of attack and tried homicide. Authorities mentioned the New Jersey resident left the target market and rushed the degree the place the “The Satanic Verses” writer was once about to talk in August 2022, stabbing him greater than a dozen occasions prior to onlookers intervened.

Rushdie, 76, who was once left blinded in his proper eye and with a broken left hand, wrote in regards to the assault in a memoir: “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder,” due out April 16.

Matar has been in custody since in an instant after the assault on the Chautauqua Institution, an arts and highbrow retreat within the rural southwest nook of New York state.

“I think the biggest hurdle for all of us is going to be picking a fair and impartial jury,” Schmidt mentioned. He estimated the trial itself would remaining two weeks or much less.

Rushdie was once the objective of a decades-old fatwa by means of the past due Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for his demise over alleged blasphemy in “The Satanic Verses.”