Salman Rushdie’s would be-assassin charged with supporting terror group Hezbollah
Hadi Matar
A man in his early 20s who severely injured acclaimed author Salman Rushdie in August 2022 in western New York now faces a new charge of supporting Hezbollah, the Lebanon-based and Iran-back militant-political group that the US describes as a terrorist group.
An indictment unsealed in US. District Court in Buffalo on Wednesday (July 24) charged Hadi Matar with providing material support to Hezbollah, sometime between September 2020 and August 2022.
The indictment, however, did not detail what evidence linked Matar to the group.
The federal charge comes after Matar earlier this month rejected an offer by state prosecutors to recommend a shorter prison sentence if he agreed to plead guilty in Chautauqua County Court, where he is charged with attempted murder and assault.
Matar, 26, is imprisoned without bail since the 2022 attack.
On August 12, 2022, Matar stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times for about 27 seconds, as the acclaimed writer was on-stage about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution.
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Knife wounds blinded Rushdie in one eye. The event moderator, Henry Reese, was also wounded.
After recovering from the wounds following weeks of rehabilitation, Rushdie wrote down the details of the attack in an intimate memoir 'Knife, Meditations After An Attempted Murder'.
The Booker Prize-winning author described his would-be assassin with a single letter: A.
The knife attack on Rushdie came over 33years after that Valentine's Day of 1989, when Iran's then Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared his novel 'The Satanic Verses' blasphemous and issued a fatwa ordering his execution and "all those involved in its publication."
Also watch |WION Wideangle | Salman Rushdie attack: The World of Fatwas, decoded
In the book, Rushdiechallenges the very orthodoxy that filled 'A.' with hatred vile enough that he nearly killed Rushdie for purportedly being "disingenuous".
Rushdie defends an artist's and art's right to exist because, without art, "our ability to think, to see freshly, and to renew our world would wither and die".