A New Jersey man has been convicted of attempted murder by a jury for stabbing author Salman Rushdie multiple times on a New York lecture stage in 2022.
The jurors, who deliberated for less than two hours, also found Hadi Matar, 27, guilty of assault for wounding a man who was on stage with Rushdie at the time.
Matar ran onto the stage at the Chautauqua Institution where Rushdie was about to speak on August 12, 2022, and stabbed him more than a dozen times before a live audience.
The attack left the 77-year-old prize-winning novelist blind in one eye.
Rushdie was the key witness during seven days of testimony, describing in graphic detail his life-threatening injuries and long and painful recovery.
Matar, sitting at the defence table, looked down but had no obvious reaction when the jury delivered the verdict.
As he was led out of the courtroom in handcuffs, he quietly uttered, "Free Palestine," echoing comments he has frequently made while entering and leaving the trial.
The judge scheduled his sentencing for April 23. Matar could receive up to 25 years in prison.
His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, said Matar was disappointed but also well-prepared for the verdict.
District Attorney Jason Schmidt played a slow-motion video of the attack for the jury Friday during his closing argument, pointing out the assailant as he emerged from the audience, walked up a staircase to the stage and broke into a run toward Rushdie.
"I want you to look at the unprovoked nature of this attack," Mr Schmidt said.
"I want you to look at the targeted nature of the attack. There were a lot of people around that day, but there was only one person who was targeted."
Assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors had not proved that Matar intended to kill Rushdie, an important distinction for an attempted-murder conviction.
"You will agree something bad happened to Mr Rushdie, but you don't know what Mr Matar's conscious objective was," Mr Brautigan said.
"The testimony you have heard doesn't establish anything more than a chaotic noisy outburst that occurred that injured Mr Rushdie."
Matar's attorneys had previously pointed out that he had brought knives with him, not a gun or a bomb, and noted that Rushdie's heart and lungs were uninjured.
Mr Schmidt said while it was not possible to read Matar's mind, "it's foreseeable that if you're going to stab someone 10 or 15 times about the face and neck, it's going to result in a fatality".
He also reminded jurors about the testimony of a trauma surgeon, who said Rushdie's injuries would have been fatal without quick treatment.
Rushdie, who had been at the event to speak about keeping writers safe, told jurors during the trial he thought he was dying when a masked stranger ran onto the stage and stabbed and slashed at him until being tackled by bystanders.
Wounded more than a dozen times in the head, throat, torso, thigh and hand, Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a New York City rehabilitation centre, which he detailed in his 2024 memoir, Knife.
During his testimony, he showed jurors his now-blinded right eye , usually hidden behind a darkened eyeglass lens.
Throughout the trial, Matar often took notes with a pen and sometimes laughed or smiled with his defence team during breaks in testimony. His lawyers declined to call any witnesses of their own and Matar did not testify in his defence.
A separate federal indictment for terrorism-related charges alleges that Matar was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or edict, calling for Rushdie's death.
Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after publication of the novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran announced that it would not enforce the decree, he had travelled freely over the past quarter-century.
A trial on the federal terrorism-related charges will be scheduled in the US District Court in Buffalo.
AP/ABC
