The publication of Salman Rushdie's memoirs postpones the trial for the attempted murder against the writer

The trial of the man accused of stabbing British writer of Indian origin Salman Rushdie in 2022 has been postponed, after the magistrate in charge of the case determined that the alleged attacker has the right to read the author's memoirs about the incident, which will be published in April.

David Foley, judge for Chautauqua County in New York, had indicated on Tuesday that Hadi Matar, 26, has the right to access the manuscript and all types of materials related to it in order to prepare his defense. But since the volume is not yet published, Foley had left it up to Matar's lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, to decide whether to wait until the book was available.

Finally, this Wednesday Foley announced the postponement of the trial, which was to have started next week. Jury selection was scheduled to begin on Monday, January 8.

The delay will allow Matar's lawyers to request the delivery of “certain materials underlying the planned publication of Mr. Rushdie's book,” according to the prosecutor in charge of the case, Jason Schmidt. Schmidt had asked the publishers for a copy of the volume, which was denied for intellectual property reasons.

The prosecutor has downplayed the postponement, which he assures will not affect the outcome of the trial. He also does not believe that the existence of the work will have a great impact on the development of the view, given that the attack was carried out in public before a large audience and there are numerous eyewitnesses – and recordings – of what happened.

“It's not just the book,” Barone told the AP news agency. “I will have every little note that Rushdie wrote, I have the right. Every conversation, every recording, anything he has done in relation to this book.”

The volume, titled in English Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder (“Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”), will go on sale on April 16, according to Penguin, its publishing imprint. Rushdie revealed in October that he was working on this work; By then, preparations for the trial were already underway.

Rushdie was due to give a talk at Chautauqua on August 12, 2022 when a man approached the stage and stabbed the author of “The Satanic Verses” a dozen times in the neck, stomach, thigh, chest and eye. The writer was hospitalized for a month and a half and ended up losing vision in his right eye, and the sensation of touch in several fingers of his left hand.

In an interview offered to The New York Post After his arrest, Matar alleged that Rushdie had “attacked Islam” and praised the late Iranian leader Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1989, the Ayatollah had issued a fatwa, or Islamic edict, in which he called for the death of the writer as a blasphemer after having written “The Satanic Verses.”

That sentence forced Rushdie to live in hiding and under the protection of Scotland Yard for years, although after Khomeini's death he has been able to travel freely in the last two decades.

Matar has dual nationality of the United States, the country where he was born, and Lebanon, where his parents come from. His mother has stated that the young man changed and became more introverted and moody after a visit to his father in the Arab country in 2018.

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