Salman Rushdie Attacker Convicted on Terrorism Charges, Alleged Hezbollah Links: ‘Hadi Matar Followed Fatwa Call’ | Today’s news
The man who stabbed and partially blinded author Salman Rushdie on stage at the Art Institute of New York in 2022 was found guilty Wednesday of federal terrorism charges stemming from the attack.
A federal jury on Wednesday convicted Hadi Matar, 28, of supporting the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and “engaging in an act of terrorism” when he attacked writer Salman Rushdie at a New York cultural center in August 2022, the AFP news agency reported.
Hadi Matar was convicted of attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah, a terrorist organization designated by the United States, as well as engaging in transnational terrorism and providing material support to terrorists.
A jury in U.S. District Court in Buffalo, New York, returned its verdict on all counts after two hours of deliberations, ending a trial that began last Tuesday, a spokesman for federal prosecutors said, cited by Reuters.
The Lebanese-American “decided to align his values with the terrorist values of Iran’s leaders,” US Attorney Michael DiGiacomo said, adding that the defendant spent months planning the stabbing that nearly killed Rushdie and left him blind in one eye.
Prosecutors said Matar followed a fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution, first issued in 1989 by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for fictionalizing the Prophet Muhammad in his bestseller The Satanic Verses.
Attack in 2022
Rushdie, 79, has faced threats to his life since publishing his novel The Satanic Verses in 1988. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader at the time, condemned the book as blasphemous, leading to a call for Rushdie’s death, an edict known as a fatwa.
According to evidence presented at his trial, Matar spent more than a year researching the fatwa before deciding to try to fulfill the edict by attacking Rushdie while the author was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in Mayville, New York.
Rushdie was stabbed multiple times in the head, neck, torso and left hand, blinding his right eye and damaging his internal organs, requiring emergency surgery and months of recovery.
Matar, an American citizen from Fairview, New Jersey, was convicted of attempted murder in New York state court in 2025 and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
His conviction on federal terrorism charges carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Sentencing was scheduled for November 3.
