Knifeman who stabbed Salman Rushdie 15 times in front of stunned audience convicted of terrorism charges
THE knifeman who stabbed Salman Rushdie 15 times in front of a horrifed audience in 2022 has been convicted of federal terrorism charges.
Matar was accused of doing the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah’s deadly dirty work by carrying out his decades-old death sentence on Rushdie.
A jury found Hadi Matar, 28, guilty of all the charges against him, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism.
He now faces the terrifying prospect of life behind bars over the savage 2022 attack at a packed amphitheatre.
Matar is already serving a 25-year New York state prison sentence after being convicted of attempted murder over the shocking assault.
The federal conviction could now see his punishment stretch to life in prison.
The Indian-born British and American novelist was preparing to speak about writers’ safety when Matar stormed the stage and launched his frenzied attack.
The celebrated author was repeatedly slashed in front of a stunned audience, suffering devastating injuries that left him blind in his right eye.
Matar’s lawyers had argued there was no proof of what was going through his mind when he attacked the literary giant.
Defence lawyer Nathaniel Barone claimed prosecutors had no evidence proving Matar’s state of mind.
But prosecutors painted a chilling picture of an attacker allegedly obsessed with a decades-old death sentence against Rushdie.
They said Matar was driven by late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s 1989 call for Rushdie’s death over his controversial novel The Satanic Verses.
The attacker refused to testify during the explosive trial.
Rushdie, however, took the stand and confronted the man accused of trying to kill him.
He told jurors: “I cant say what his ambitions or his aim was, but the wounds were dispersed across my body.”
Prosecutors claimed Matar had repeatedly discussed the fatwa with contacts on messaging apps in the years before the attack.
Court exhibits allegedly showed him raging that Rushdie had attacked Islam and had emboldened others to insult the faith by surviving.
Matar also allegedly referred to a 2006 comment by the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.
The US-born attacker also holds Lebanese citizenship, while Hezbollah is based in Lebanon.
Prosecutors said photographs found in Matar’s New Jersey bedroom and on his computer showed his support for Hezbollah, which the US has designated a terrorist organisation.
Assistant US Attorney Timothy Lynch told jurors in his opening statement on July 22: “Matar aimed to fulfill the fatwa and wanted everyone to know he was doing this for Hezbollah.”
The prosecution claimed Matar’s messages revealed a terrifying escalation from wanting to expose Rushdie to allegedly plotting to kill him.
In a private note to himself, Matar allegedly wrote: “We need to kill him ASAP,” according to Lynch.
Prosecutors said Matar framed the planned killing as part of what he considered a jihad, or holy war.
By spring 2022, investigators calimed Matar had worked out where Rushdie lived and was tacking his public appearances.
He allegedly homed in on Rushdie’s scheduled appearance at the Chautauqua Institution in western New York.
As Rushdie was being introduced, his attacker climbed onto the stage behind him.
Matar then stabbed the author 15 times as horrified spectators gasped.
Audience members and another speaker, Henry Reese, desperately scrambled to help the gravely wounded writer.
Law enforcement officers assigned to the event arrested Matar after civilians managed to restrain him.
Rushdie had spent years living under the shadow of a death threat after The Satanic Verses was published in 1988.
The novel triggered furious protests across parts of the Muslim world over what some believers viewed as blasphemous suggestions about the Prophet Muhammad.
The shocking fallout was deadly, with at least 45 people killed in riots linked to the book.
A Japanese translator was stabbed to death, an Italian translator was attacked and survived, while the book’s Norwegian publisher survived a shooting.
Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim family, has maintained that the controversial dream sequence in the novel was simply fiction.
He was forced into hiding for years before gradually returning to public life after Iran’s government distanced itself from Khomeini’s fatwa in 1998.
Rushdie told the trial in Buffalo, New York: “For two decades or more, I led a public life without a hint of trouble.”
But the threat never fully disappeared.
The fatwa was never rescinded, while Khomeini’s successor, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, indicated in 2017 that it remained in effect.
An Iranian foundation has also offered a bounty of more than $3million for Rushdie’s killing.
Rushdie went on to publish a memoir about the horrific attack in 2024 before returning to fiction with last year’s The Eleventh Hour.
The acclaimed author won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, which explored his native India.
He was later knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II and received a Dayton Literary Peace Prize lifetime achievement award in November.
