(AFP) — Novelist Salman Rushdie described Tuesday the moment a knife-wielding attacker stormed on stage and attempted to kill him with a frenzied attack that left him blind in one eye.
“The Satanic Verses” author told jurors at the trial of his alleged attacker, 23-year-old American-Lebanese Hadi Matar, that Matar “was stabbing and slashing” at him.
“I was aware of this person rushing at me on my right hand side,” he said, describing how he was on stage at an arts event in New York state in August 2022.
“I only saw him at the last minute.”
“I was very struck by his eyes which were dark and seemed very ferocious to me,” Rushdie said of the attacker who wore a Covid mask.
“It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie said, adding that he was left in a “lake of blood.”
Matar’s legal…
