Salman Rushdies attacker Hadi Matar convicted on federal terrorism charges for horrific lecture stabbing

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 found Hadi Matar guilty of all the charges against him, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism.A message seeking comment was sent to Matar’s attorneys.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, 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.”Rushdie won Britain’s prestigious Booker Prize for his 1981 novel “Midnight’s Children,” about his native India.

“The Satanic Verses,”a novel of magical realism about the lives and dreams of two actors who survive a plane explosion, followed in 1988.It drew critical acclaim in the United Kingdom but engendered protests around the Muslim world over what some believers saw as blasphemous suggestions about Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, particularly in a dream sequence.Over the ensuing years, at least 45 people were killed in riots over the book, a Japanese translator was stabbed to death, an Italian translator was attacked and survived, and the book’s Norwegian publisher survived a shooting.Rushdie, who was born into a Muslim family, has said the dream sequence was just that.

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