A man was convicted 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 in Buffalo, New York, found Hadi Matar guilty of all the charges against him, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism, the AP reports. 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.
Rushdie, who was about to speak on writers' safety when he was attacked, was slashed 15 times in front of a stunned audience. He was gravely wounded and lost the sight in his right eye. Prosecutors asserted that Matar was motivated by the late Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's 1989 call for Rushdie's death because of The Satanic Verses. Defense lawyer Nathaniel Barone countered that the government had no proof of what was in Matar's head. Matar himself declined to testify. Rushdie did, telling jurors: "I can't say what his ambitions or his aim was, but the wounds were dispersed across my body."
Born in the US, Matar also holds citizenship in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based. Prosecutors said that photos in Matar's New Jersey bedroom and on his computer indicated his support for Hezbollah, which the US has designated a terrorist organization. Matar aimed to fulfill the fatwa and "wanted everyone to know he was doing this for Hezbollah," Assistant US Attorney Timothy Lynch said in an opening statement July 22. The messages showed Matar initially talked about wanting to expose Rushdie, then about taking his life. In a private note to himself, he wrote: "We need to kill him ASAP," according to Lynch. The prosecutor said Matar framed the planned killing as part of what he considered a jihad, or holy war.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
