Mayville, NY – Salman Rushdie described with graphic details on Tuesday about frantic moments in 2022 when a masked man haste I would die.
Rushdie took the position during the second day of testimony in the trial of Hadi Mata, 27, who declared himself innocent of attempted murder and assault in the attack that also wounded another man. It was the first time since the stabbing that the 77 -year -old author found in the same room as the man accused of trying to kill him.
Rushdie recalled having felt “a feeling of great pain and shock, and aware of the fact that there was a huge amount of blood in which he was lying” after the attack.
“It occurred to me that I was dying. That was my predominant thought, ”he said, added that the people who submitted his assailant probably saved his life.
While recounted the attack, his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, cried of his seat in the second row of the courtroom.
“I only saw him at the last minute,” Rushdie said about the man who ran on the stage at the Chautauqua institution and repeatedly stabbed him with a 10 -inch blade.
“I was aware that someone wore black clothes, or dark clothes and a black face mask. He was very beaten by his eyes, they were dark and seemed very fierce. “
Rushdie said she first thought her attacker who pushes a knife was hitting him with a fist.
“But I saw a lot of blood turning on my clothes,” he said. “I was hitting me repeatedly. Hit and cut. “
Rushdie said she was hit again on her chest and torso and stabbed on her chest while fighting to escape.
“I was very badly injured. I couldn’t get up anymore. I fell, ”he said.
Rushdie was blinded in an eye in the attack.
He spent 17 days in a hospital in Pennsylvania and more than three weeks in a rehabilitation center in New York City, where he had to learn basic skills such as tightening the toothpaste of a tube. He detailed his months of recovery in a memory published last year.
“I think I’m not 100%. I think I have recovered substantially, but it is probably 75 to 80%, ”Rushdie testified. “I am not as energetic as it used to be. I am not as physically strong as it used to be. “
Killing, who was sitting about 20 feet away from Rushdie in the courtroom, often looked during his testimony.
Lynn Schaffer, a public defender who represents to kill, began the interrogation by asking the Booker Prize winner about his career. The interrogation was brief, discreet and for a friendly moment. She asked Rushdie if he would be surprised that “Bridget Jones’ newspaper, in which he makes a cameo, was his favorite movie.
“I’m surprised,” said Rushdie, joking that it was his “most important work.”
The only track of a possible defense strategy was a question about whether trauma can affect memories.
Rushdie acknowledged that he had a false memory, who thought he stood up when he saw the attacker approach, but that was not true.
Then he challenged him to remember how many times he was beaten.
“I wasn’t counting at that time. Otherwise I was busy. But then I could see them in my body. I didn’t need anyone to tell me. “
No one asked Rushdie to identify his attacker in the Court and refused to be interviewed when he left the court after approximately an hour of testimony.
Security was remarkably stricter before the appearance of Rushdie, with several police vehicles parked outside the court.
On Monday, the employees of the Chautauqua institution, the non -profit art and education center where the attack occurred about 75 miles south of Buffalo, testified about the attack.
The trial is expected to last up to two weeks.
It is unlikely that the jurors listen to a fatwa issued by the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini asking for Rushdie’s death, according to the district prosecutor Jason Schmidt. Rushdie, author of “Midnight’s Children” and “Victory City”, spent years hidden after Jomeini announced Fatwa in 1989 after the publication of the novel “The Satanic Verses”, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Schmidt has said that discussing the reason for killing will be unnecessary in the state trial, since the attack was seen by a live audience that hoped to listen to Rushdie to present a conference to hold the safe writers.
“This is not a case of wrong identity,” Schmidt said during the opening statements on Monday. “Lord. Killing is the person who attacked Mr. Rushdie without provocation.”
Schaffer, the defense lawyer, told the jury that the case is not as simple as prosecutors have managed to be.
“The elements of the crime are more than” something really bad, “they are more defined,” said Schaffer. “Something bad happened, something very bad happened, but the district prosecutor has to demonstrate much more than that.”
In a separate accusation, federal authorities claim that killing was driven to act for the support of a terrorist organization in 2006 of the Fatwa. A subsequent trial on federal terrorism positions will be scheduled in the United States District Court in Buffalo.
