Close arguments are underway in the man’s process …

Mayville, NY (AP) – Lawyers were delivered on Friday the closing arguments in the process of a New Jersey man accused of trying to kill Salman Rushdie On a lecture stage in New York, in a knife attack, who left the blind author in an eye and with other serious wounds.

Hadi Matar, 27, is accused of attempted murder and aggression in the August 2022 attack at the Chautauqua institution in western New York. He is facing up to 25 years in prison if he is sentenced.

District lawyer Jason Schmidt played a slow-moving jury attack video and emphasized the attacker coming out of the public, climbing a staircase and walking to a run to Rushdie.

“I want you to look at the unprovocated nature of this attack,” Schmidt said. “I want to look at the target nature of the attack. There were a lot of people that day, but it was a single person who was targeted.”

Assistant public defender Andrew Brautigan told the jury that prosecutors have not proven that Matar intends to kill Rushdie.

“You will agree that something bad has happened to Mr. Rushdie, but you do not know what was the conscious goal of Mr. Matar,” Brautigan said. wounded Mr. Rushdie. ”

Schmidt said that although it is not possible to read Matar’s mind: “It is predictable that if you stab someone 10 or 15 times about the face and neck, it will lead to a fatality.”

Rushdie, 77, was the key witness during the testimony that started last week. The winner of the Booker Award told the jurors that thought he was dying When a masked stranger ran on stage and stabbed it and cut it until it was approached by the participants. Rushdie showed the jurors Now eyes as blindusually hidden behind a dark lens of glasses.

Also, the jurors heard from a trauma surgeon who said that Rushdie’s wounds would have been fatal without quick treatment, and a law officer who said that Matar is calm and cooperative in his custody.

Leo was shown The video of the attack And after being captured from several angles by Chautauqua institution rooms. Records also raised the panting and screams from the public members who were sitting to hear Rushdie talking to the founder of City of Asylum Pittsburgh Henry Reese about keeping the writers safe. Reese suffered a goose to her forehead.

From the witness stand, the staff of the institution and others present on that day indicated to Matar as the attacker.

Stabbed and slammed more than a dozen times in the head, neck, torso, thigh and hand, Rushdie spent 17 days at a Pennsylvania hospital and more than three weeks at a rehabilitation center. He detailed his long and painful recovery in Its memory of 2024“Knife”.

Throughout the process, Matar often took notes with a pen and sometimes laughed or smiled with defense lawyers during the testimony breaks.

His lawyers refused to call any witness, and Matar did not testify in his defense. Instead, lawyers challenged the witnesses of criminal prosecution as part of a strategy intended to question if Matar intended to kill and not just hurt Rushdie. The distinction is important for an attempt to condemn to murder.

Matar had knives with him, not a weapon or a bomb, his lawyers said. And the heart and lungs of Rushdie were unripe, noted in response to the testimony that the wounds put life in danger.

Public defender Nathaniel Barone said Matar would probably have been confronted with a lower accusation of attack if he had not been for Rushdie’s celebrity.

“We believe that it has become an attempt to kill because of the notoriety of the alleged victim in this case,” Barone told reporters after the testimony ended on Thursday. “That was from the beginning. There was nothing more, nothing less. And is for advertising purposes. It is for purposes of self -interest. “

A separate Federal indictment He claims that Matar, from Fairview, New Jersey, was motivated to attack Rushdie by a 2006 speech in which the leader of the militant group Hezbollah held a decades, or an edict, requesting Rushdie’s death. The Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued Fatwa in 1989 after the publication of the novel “The Satan Verses”, which some Muslims consider Blasfem.

Rushdie spent years in hiding. But after Iran announced that he would not apply the decree, he traveled freely in the last quarter of a century.

A trial on federal accusations related to terrorism will be scheduled at the US District Court in Buffalo.