A federal jury on Wednesday convicted a man on terrorism-related charges stemming from the 2022 knife attack on celebrated author Salman Rushdie, who has lived for decades under a death threat linked to his controversial novel “The Satanic Verses.”
Jurors found 28-year-old Hadi Matar guilty on every count he faced, including carrying out an act of transnational terrorism.
A request for comment was sent to Matar’s legal team.
Matar is already serving a 25-year sentence in New York state prison after being convicted of attempted murder for the August 2022 assault, which unfolded onstage at an amphitheater. His new federal conviction could result in a life prison term.
Rushdie had been preparing to speak about the safety of writers when he was attacked before a shocked audience. He was stabbed and slashed 15 times, suffered severe injuries and ultimately lost vision in his right eye.
Matar’s defense: No evidence of his state of mind
Federal prosecutors argued that Matar was driven by a 1989 decree from Iran’s late Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini calling for Rushdie’s death over “The Satanic Verses.” Defense attorney Nathaniel Barone challenged that claim, telling jurors the government could not prove Matar’s state of mind.
Matar did not take the witness stand in his own defense. Rushdie, however, testified during the trial, telling jurors: “I can’t say what his ambitions or his aim was, but the wounds were dispersed across my body.”
Rushdie rose to international literary prominence with “Midnight’s Children,” his 1981 novel about his native India that won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize. In 1988, he published “The Satanic Verses,” a work of magical realism centered on the lives and dreams of two actors who survive a plane explosion.
It drew critical acclaim in the United Kingdom but engendered protests around the Muslim world over what some believers saw as blasphemous suggestions about Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, particularly in a dream sequence. Over the ensuing years, at least 45 people were killed in riots over the book, a Japanese translator was stabbed to death, an Italian translator was attacked and survived, and the book’s Norwegian publisher survived a shooting.
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim family, has said the dream sequence was just that. But he went into hiding for years, gradually emerging after Iran’s government distanced itself in 1998 from Khomeini’s fatwa, or religious edict.
“For two decades or more, I led a public life without a hint of trouble,” Rushdie testified at the trial in Buffalo, New York.
Yet the fatwa was never rescinded; indeed, Khomenei’s successor, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicated in 2017 that it remained in effect. An Iranian foundation has offered a more than $3 million bounty for killing Rushdie.
Prosecutors: Matar’s messages showed him zeroing in on Rushdie
Matar repeatedly broached the fatwa with contacts in messaging apps in 2021 and 2022, according to exhibits shown in court. The messages showed Matar fuming that he felt Rushdie had attacked Islam and, by surviving, emboldened others to insult the faith. Matar alluded to a 2006 comment along those lines by the late Hezbollah militant group leader Hassan Nasrallah, the messages showed.
Born in the U.S., Matar also holds citizenship in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based. Prosecutors said that photos in Matar’s New Jersey bedroom and on his computer indicated his support for Hezbollah, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization.
Matar aimed to fulfill the fatwa and “wanted everyone to know he was doing this for Hezbollah,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Lynch said in an opening statement July 22.
The messages showed Matar initially talked about wanting to “expose” Rushdie, then about taking his life. In a private note to himself, he wrote: “We need to kill him ASAP,” according to Lynch. The prosecutor said Matar framed the planned killing as part of what he considered a jihad, or holy war.
By spring 2022, the electronic chats showed, Matar wrote that he had discerned where Rushdie lived and was tracking his public appearances, eventually pointing out his scheduled August 2022 talk at the Chautauqua Institution, a western New York arts and intellectual center.
As Rushdie was being introduced, his attacker climbed on stage behind him, then stabbed him 15 times as the audience gasped. Spectators and another speaker, Henry Reese, scrambled to aid Rushdie. Law enforcement officers, assigned to the event, arrested the attacker — soon identified as Matar — after civilians restrained him.
Rushdie published a 2024 memoir about the attack, then returned to fiction with last year’s “The Eleventh Hour.” The author, who was knighted by Britain’s late Queen Elizabeth II, received a Dayton Literary Peace Prize lifetime achievement award in November.
