Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie in 2022 convicted of federal terrorism charges

The Guardian reports that a federal jury has convicted Hadi Matar, 28, on terrorism charges over the August 2022 stabbing of the author Salman Rushdie in western New York. Matar was found guilty of all charges, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism, and the federal conviction carries a potential life sentence — on top of the 25-year New York state prison term he is already serving for attempted murder.

The attack happened moments before Rushdie was to give a lecture about the safety of writers, on an open-air stage at the Chautauqua Institution. Rushdie, who had lived under a death threat for decades because of his novel The Satanic Verses, was stabbed repeatedly in front of a stunned audience and gravely wounded, losing the sight in his right eye; the moderator at the event was also hurt. Prosecutors said Matar shared propaganda videos before the attack, communicated with an Iran-based contact who claimed to know where to find Rushdie, and asked whether the fatwa against the author was still active. Their case linked his alleged motives to a 2006 speech in which Hezbollah's then-leader endorsed the decades-old edict, and Matar later admitted to having read only a couple of pages of the book that sparked it. He declined to testify in his own defence.

Rushdie, who testified in the case, has described lying in blood with a cloudy sense of time and a clear conviction that he was dying, and wrote about the attack in a memoir published in 2024. The verdict closes a federal chapter in an ordeal whose origins reach back more than 35 years, and it came after a trial that once again put questions of religious edicts, free expression, and the protection of writers at the centre of public attention.