Man who attacked author Salman Rushdie charged with supporting terrorist group
BUFFALO, NY — A man who seriously injured author Salman Rushdie in a savage knife attack in Western New York is again being charged with supporting a terrorist group.
An indictment unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Buffalo accuses Hadi Matar of providing material support to Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon and backed by Iran. The indictment did not detail the evidence linking Matar to the group.
The federal indictment comes after Matar was charged earlier this month an offer rejected by prosecutors to recommend a shorter prison sentence if he agreed to plead guilty in Chautauqua County Superior Court, where he is charged with attempted murder and assault. The agreement also would have required him to plead guilty to a federal terrorism charge that had not yet been filed.
Instead, the two cases will now be tried separately. Jury selection in the state case is scheduled for October 15.
Matar’s attorney, Nathaniel Barone, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the 2022 attack, in which he stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times while the acclaimed writer was onstage giving a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution. The stabbings left Rushdie blind in one eye. The event’s moderator, Henry Reese, was also injured.
Rushdie detailed the attack and his long and painful recovery in a memoir published in April.
The author spent years in hiding after the Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwaor edict, in 1989 calling for Rushdie’s death because of his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Khomeini considered the book blasphemous. Rushdie reappeared in public in the late 1990s.
Matar was born in the U.S. but has dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. He lived in New Jersey before the attack. His mother has said her son became withdrawn and moody after visiting his father in Lebanon in 2018.
The attack raised questions about whether Rushdie had been given adequate security, as he continues to receive death threats. A state police officer and a county sheriff’s deputy were assigned to the lecture. In 1991, a Japanese translator of “The Satanic Verses” was stabbed to death. An Italian translator survived a knife attack that same year. In 1993, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times but survived.
The investigation into the Rushdie stabbing focused partly on whether Matar acted alone or worked with militant or religious groups.