The trial of the man accused of slashing renowned author Salman Rushdie in a frenzied knife attack on a western New York stage will continue. Jurors in the trial of Hadi Matar, 27, heard testimony on Monday from officials at the arts facility where Rushdie was scheduled to speak in August 2022, when prosecutors claim the Fairview, New Jersey man attacked the author on stage and stabbed him more than a dozen times.

Matar has been in detention since he was apprehended by bystanders following the attack. He has not pleaded guilty to attempted murder or assault. The 77-year-old novelist was blinded in one eye during the attack and spent months rehabilitating, which he described in a memoir published last year. A speaker who was scheduled to appear alongside Rushdie was also hurt. The study is expected to last up to two weeks. Jurors are scheduled to see video and photographs from the day of the attack. According to district attorney Jason Schmidt, they are unlikely to learn about the late Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s fatwa demanding for Rushdie’s death.

Rushdie, the author of “Midnight’s Children” and “Victory City,” spent years in hiding when Khomeini issued the fatwa in 1989 after the novel “The Satanic Verses” was published, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.

Mr Schmidt has stated that examining Matar’s purpose will be redundant in the state prosecution, given that the attack was witnessed by the live crowd that gathered to hear Rushdie speak. “This is not a case of mistaken identity,” Mr Schmidt stated in his opening remarks on Monday. “Mr Matar is the person who attacked Mr Rushdie without provocation.” A public lawyer for Matar, however, warned jurors that the case is not as simple as prosecutors claimed. “The elements of the crime are more than ‘something really bad happened’ — they’re more defined,” Lynn Schaffer told CBS News. “Something bad did happen, something very bad did happen, but the district attorney has to prove much more than that.” In a separate charge, US officials alleges

FILE – Author Salman Rushdie poses for a portrait to promote his book “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”, at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin, Germany, May 16, 2024. (AP Photo/Ebrahim Noroozi, File)