New Jersey man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie was trying to carry out fatwa, prosecutor says

A man who severely injured author Salman Rushdie in a frenzied knife attack in western New York was motivated by a Hezbollah leader's endorsement of a fatwa calling for Rushdie's death, prosecutors said Wednesday in announcing new terrorism charges.

The three-count indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Buffalo offered for the first time a potential motive for the 2022 attack on “The Satanic Verses” author.

Hadi Matar, a U.S. citizen from New Jersey, was attempting to carry out a fatwa, Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Kruly said. According to the prosecutor, Matar believed the call for Rushdie's death, first issued in 1989, was backed by the Lebanon-based militant group Hezbollah and endorsed in a 2006 speech by the group’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah.

"We allege that in attempting to murder Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022, Hadi Matar committed an act of terrorism in the name of Hezbollah, a designated terrorist organization aligned with the Iranian regime,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a news release. “The Justice Department will prosecute those who perpetrate violence in the name of terrorist groups and undermine the basic freedoms enshrined in our Constitution.”

Matar, who faces separate state charges of attempted murder and assault, pleaded not guilty to the new federal charges of terrorism transcending national boundaries, providing material support to terrorists and attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization.

“The investigation was lengthy, for the last two years, and I’m sure involved a number of different agencies, a number of different countries and a number of individuals,” Matar’s attorney, Nathaniel Barone, said after the arraignment. He said the federal case will be far more complex than the state charges, which focus largely on the assault on Rushdie while he was onstage and about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution in August 2022.

“Federally, you're looking at more of conspiracies,” the lawyer said.

Matar, he said, “plans on proceeding with a vigorous defense and maintain his innocence.”

Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the attack, during which he stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times before a stunned audience of about 1,500 people. Knife wounds blinded Rushdie in one eye. The event moderator, Henry Reese, was also wounded before bystanders subdued the assailant.

“This defendant put time and effort into traveling to the western district of New York with the intent of taking the life of another,” U.S. Attorney Trini Ross said. “Only because of the brave efforts of those who were present that day, the defendant was prevented from completing his murderous intention."

Rushdie detailed the attack and his long and painful recovery in a memoir published in April.

The federal charges come after Matar earlier this month rejected an offer by state prosecutors to recommend a shorter prison sentence if he agreed to plead guilty to both state and the anticipated federal charges. Instead, both cases will now proceed to trial separately. Jury selection in the state case is set for Oct. 15.

A detention hearing in the federal case is scheduled for Aug. 7.

The author spent years in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa in 1989 calling for Rushdie's death over his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Khomeini considered the book blasphemous. Rushdie reemerged into the public in the late 1990s.

Matar was born in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. He lived in Fairview, New Jersey, prior to the attack. His mother has said that her son became withdrawn and moody after he visited his father in Lebanon in 2018.

The attack raised questions about whether Rushdie had gotten proper security protection, given that he is still the subject of death threats. A state police trooper and county sheriff's deputy had been assigned to the lecture. In 1991, a Japanese translator of “The Satanic Verses” was stabbed to death. An Italian translator survived a knife attack the same year. In 1993, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times but survived.

The investigation into Rushdie's stabbing focused partly on whether Matar had been acting alone or in concert with militant or religious groups.