Salman Rushdie describes a ‘lake of blood’ as his convicted attacker faces terrorism charges tied to the 2022 stabbing

Four years after being stabbed on an amphitheater stage, Salman Rushdie sat across a courtroom from his convicted attacker Thursday and told jurors for a second time about the ambush that nearly killed him.

The prize-winning writer recalled feeling what he thought was a punch under his chin, then feeling blood coming from his neck.

Soon “I was on the stage, lying down, with an enormous pool of blood all around me,” Rushdie testified. “It was an enormous and expansive lake of blood.”

A Buffalo federal court jury watched Rushdie fixedly as he testified — and at one point removed his glasses to show his now sightless right eye — at Hadi Matar’s terrorism trial. He has pleaded not guilty.

Matar already was convicted of a state-level attempted murder charge in the 2022 attack at a cultural institution where Rushdie was poised to speak about threats to writers and artists. Federal prosecutors say Matar was acting on such a threat — an Iranian leader’s 1989 call for Rushdie’s death because of his novel “The Satanic Verses.”

“I can’t say what his ambitions or his aim was, but the wounds were dispersed across my body,” Rushdie testified.

Rushdie: Knife came ‘a millimeter from my brain’

Rushdie, 79, was composed and straightforward during little more than an hour on the witness stand. He outlined the attack — which blinded him in the right eye, damaged his liver, paralyzed his left hand for a time and briefly put him on a ventilator — and his lengthy........

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