A man who tried to murder Sir Salman Rushdie by stabbing the author more than a dozen times has been convicted of terrorism.
Hadi Matar, an American-Lebanese citizen, was found guilty of all charges against him by a jury in New York on Wednesday, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism when he attacked Sir Salman at a literary event in 2022.
Matar, 28, from New Jersey, is already serving a 25-year state prison sentence for attempted murder over the attack, in which the Booker Prize-winning author nearly died and permanently lost sight in one eye.
A jury found that he was carrying out the orders of the Iranian government and launched the attack to aid a foreign terrorist group.
Sir Salman had a fatwa – a religious death warrant – placed on him in 1989 by Ayatollah Khomeini, the former Iranian supreme leader, because his novel The Satanic Verses, published the previous year, was considered blasphemous.
Prosecutors had argued in the terror case against Matar that he was motivated by the Iranian spiritual leader’s call for Sir Salman’s death and acted in allegiance to the Lebanon-based Hezbollah militant group. The US government designates Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organisation.
Salman Rushdie, left, testifies in federal court on July 23 – Alexandra Newbould/AP
They pointed to private notes written by Matar after he started researching Sir Salman’s whereabouts in 2020, in which he allegedly said “we need to kill him ASAP” and rallied himself to “become a warrior and just get it over with”.
The federal jury’s judgment, after just two hours of deliberation, means Matar could spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Nathaniel Barone, a lawyer for Matar, said there were “no facts; no hard evidence” to support the allegations. “There could be a number of reasonable, plausible explanations as to what he was thinking,” he said in an interview outside the Buffalo courthouse last week.
Matar declined to testify in the case. But Sir Salman, an Iranian-born author who grew up in India and Britain, told the court: “I can’t say what his ambitions or his aim was, but the wounds were dispersed across my body.”
Iran’s government denied involvement in the 2022 stabbing, but at the time the foreign ministry suggested Sir Salman courted trouble by insulting Islam.
Condemnation of religious censorship
The attack four years ago, as Sir Salman was preparing to deliver a public lecture on authors’ safety at the Chautauqua Institution in New York, shocked the world and triggered widespread condemnation of religious censorship and violence.
The writer published an account of the frenzied 27-second assault in a 2024 memoir entitled Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, in which he staunchly defended free speech.
Sir Salman also served as his own key witness in the 2025 trial against his attacker, in which he described Matar as a “very unimpressive little squirt” and recounted how he thought he was dying when a knife plunged into his head and body.
The author, who won the Booker Prize for his 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, has faced frequent death threats since the publication of The Satanic Verses, a work of magical realism about apocryphal verses of the Quran.
Its publication caused global protests, book burnings and killings after the Iranian supreme leader called for the death of “the author of the Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran”.
Two years later, Iran issued a multimillion-dollar bounty on “any of those involved in its publication who are aware of its content”. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the book, died months later after being stabbed repeatedly in his office by an unknown assailant.
Several other individuals faced assassination attempts over their links to the book and Sir Salman was forced into hiding for nearly a decade afterwards, receiving round-the-clock protection.
