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The man who stabbed Salman Rushdie more than a dozen times on stage at an event in western New York was found guilty Wednesday of attempting to carry out a fatwa issued by Iran’s government against the award-winning British author more than 30 years earlier.
Hadi Matar, 28, is already serving a 25-year sentence after he was convicted last year in state court of attempted murder for the 2022 knife attack that left Rushdie blind in one eye and with nerve damage.
On Wednesday, a federal jury in Buffalo took less than two hours to convict Matar of all three charges — attempting to provide material support to the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group, committing an act of terrorism that transcended national boundaries, and providing material support to terrorists, Reuters reported.
He now faces a maximum of life in prison and is set to be sentenced on November 3.
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Federal prosecutors argued that Matar had been enraged by Rushdie’s 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses,” which portrayed a fictionalized version of Muhammad that many Muslims saw as blasphemous.
A year later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or a religious edict, urging Muslims across the world to kill Rushdie. Iran’s government later backed away from the fatwa, only for Khomeini’s successor, Ali Khamenei, to reaffirm it in 2017, Reuters reported, citing the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Prosecutors said Matar, who was born in the U.S. but has Lebanese citizenship, spent more than a year studying the fatwa before attempting to fulfill it. He had also turned to Islam after a visit to the Middle East years before the eventual attack.
On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in Mayville, New York, when Matar rushed onstage and repeatedly stabbed the Indian-born author in the head, neck torso and left hand.
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Matar’s federal trial weighed whether he had committed an act of terrorism by attacking Rushdie.
Although prosecutors acknowledged that Matar never contacted anyone in Hezbollah, they argued that without the fatwa, he never would have been motivated to try to kill Rushdie, The New York Times reported.
Prosecutors presented Matar’s notes to the jury, which referenced “Jihad” and the “need to kill him ASAP,” according to the Times.
Matar’s defense attorney, Nathaniel L. Barone II, argued that his client acted independently and was not being controlled by Hezbollah.
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Prosecutors countered that by showing evidence of Matar’s devotion to Hezbollah, which included a photo of him wearing a Hezbollah shirt while making a salute, an essay he wrote that praised the terrorist group and a video he created using remarks from a former leader of Hezbollah, the Times reported.
Timothy Lynch, a federal prosecutor, said in his closing statement that Matar “wanted to be forever revered as a Hezbollah martyr,” according to the Times.
Rushdie, who testified at the trial, has previously described the attack as something that took him back to the “distant past,” when he spent a decade in hiding after the fatwa was issued.
“I saw the man in black running towards me, down the right-hand side of the seating area: Black clothes, black face mask – he was coming in hard and low, a squat missile,” Rushdie told “60 Minutes” host Anderson Cooper in April 2024. “I confess, I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in this way.”
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