A man who severely injured author Salman Rushdie in a frenzied knife attack in western New York is now facing a new charge of supporting a terrorist group. Hadi Matar has been indicted in U.S. District Court in Buffalo for providing material support to Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon and backed by Iran. The indictment, unsealed on Wednesday, did not specify the evidence linking Matar to the group.
Earlier this month, Matar declined an offer from state prosecutors to recommend a shorter prison sentence in exchange for pleading guilty to attempted murder and assault charges in Chautauqua County Court. The proposed agreement also included a federal terrorism-related charge, which had not been filed at the time. As a result, both cases will proceed to trial separately, with jury selection for the state case scheduled for October 15.
Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the 2022 attack on Rushdie, during which he stabbed the author more than a dozen times while Rushdie was on stage preparing to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution. Rushdie was left blind in one eye due to the knife wounds, and the event moderator, Henry Reese, was also injured.
Rushdie chronicled the attack and his arduous recovery in a memoir published in April. The author had previously lived in hiding after a fatwa was issued by Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran in 1989, calling for Rushdie's death over his novel “The Satanic Verses,” which was deemed blasphemous. Rushdie reemerged into the public eye in the late 1990s.
Matar, who holds dual citizenship in Lebanon and was born in the U.S., had lived in New Jersey before the attack. His mother mentioned that her son's behavior changed after a visit to his father in Lebanon in 2018.
The attack on Rushdie raised concerns about the adequacy of his security measures, given ongoing death threats against him. At the time of the attack, a state police trooper and a county sheriff's deputy were assigned to the lecture. Previous incidents related to Rushdie's novel included the fatal stabbing of a Japanese translator in 1991, a knife attack on an Italian translator in the same year, and the shooting of the book's Norwegian publisher in 1993.
The investigation into Rushdie's stabbing is exploring whether Matar acted alone or in collaboration with militant or religious groups.
