Author Salman Rushdie's attacker found guilty in federal terrorism trial

Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed acclaimed author Salman Rushdie during a public event in New York in 2022, was convicted on Wednesday (July 29) of federal terrorism charges linked to the attack, according to US court proceedings.

A federal jury found the 28-year-old guilty on all counts, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism. The conviction comes months after Matar was sentenced to 25 years in prison by a New York state court for attempted murder over the same attack. He now faces the possibility of a life sentence under the federal case.

Matar declined to testify during the trial. His lawyer, Nathaniel Barone, told the court earlier this week: “At this time, the defence rests.” Federal prosecutors argued that Matar was motivated by extremist ideology and had shared propaganda videos before the attack. They alleged he communicated with an Iran-based individual who claimed to know "where to find Rushdie" and had also asked whether the decades-old fatwa against the author remained in force.

Rushdie was attacked on stage in August 2022 while preparing to deliver a lecture on writers' safety. He was stabbed 15 times before a shocked audience and suffered life-threatening injuries, permanently losing the sight in his right eye. The attack also injured event moderator Ralph Henry Reese.

Testifying during Matar's state trial in February, Rushdie recalled believing he was about to die.

"I became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in. My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying," he told the court.

According to the federal indictment, prosecutors said Matar's alleged motivation stemmed from a 2006 speech by former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who publicly endorsed the fatwa issued against Rushdie by Iran's religious leadership more than three decades earlier.

The fatwa was declared after the publication of *The Satanic Verses*, the novel that sparked widespread outrage among some Muslims, who regarded it as blasphemous. Despite the controversy, Matar admitted after the attack that he had read only "a couple pages" of the book.

Rushdie, who was born in India and later moved to Britain, chronicled the assassination attempt in his 2024 memoir Knife.

Speaking at Tulane University's New Orleans Book Festival in March, Rushdie said writing the memoir helped him return to fiction after the trauma of the attack.

"After I finished writing the memoir, almost immediately, it's like a door in my head opened and the stories came back," he said, adding that he had feared the experience might permanently end his ability to write fiction.

Rushdie also said he wanted to move beyond being viewed solely as a symbol of free speech.

"I don't feel symbolic... I feel actual. I feel like I'm a working writer trying to make his work," he said.