A man was convicted on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges in the 2022 stabbing of Salman Rushdie, the author who has faced a decades-old death threat over his novel The Satanic Verses.
A jury found Hadi Matar guilty of all the charges against him, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism.
Matar declined to take the stand, with his attorney Nathaniel Barone saying earlier this week: “At this time, the defense rests.”
Matar, 28, is already serving a 25-year New York state prison sentence on an attempted murder conviction in the August 2022 attack on an amphitheater stage. The federal conviction carries a potential life sentence.
Prosecutors allege Matar shared propaganda videos before the attack and communicated with an Iran-based contact who claimed to know “where to find Rushdie”. They also say Matar asked whether the fatwa against Rushdie was still active.
Rushdie, who had been about to speak on writers’ safety, was slashed 15 times in front of a stunned audience. He was gravely wounded.
Speaking from the stand last February, Rushdie said: “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.”
Following the attack, which also wounded Ralph Henry Reese, the moderator at Rushdie’s planned lecture, Rushdie lost the sight in his right eye.
According to a federal indictment, Matar’s motivation for trying to kill Rushdie stemmed from a 2006 speech delivered by Hezbollah’s chief at the time, Hassan Nasrallah. In the speech, Nasrallah had endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or death warrant, placed on Rushdie by Iranian religious leaders more than 35 years ago as a result of his novel, The Satanic Verses, which won Rushdie the Booker prize in 1981.
In 2022, following Rushdie’s stabbing, Matar admitted to having read only “a couple pages” of the book that Iranian religious leaders denounced as blasphemous.
In April 2024, Rushdie, who was born in India and moved to Britain as a teenager, wrote a memoir on his attempted assassination, which he titled Knife.
“After I finished writing the memoir, almost immediately, it’s like a door in my head opened and the stories came back,” Rushdie said at Tulane University’s New Orleans book festival in March.
“I’d been really worried that I wouldn’t be able to write fiction any more … because of trauma and the shocking impact of what happened,” he added.
Rushdie also said he was tired of being everyone’s “free speech Barbie”, adding: “It’s a subject I’m anxious to change.”
“I don’t feel symbolic … I feel actual. I feel like I’m a working writer trying to make his work,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
