The man who stabbed Salman Rushdie more than a dozen times on stage at an event in western New York was found guilty Wednesday of attempting to carry out a fatwa issued by Iran’s government against the award-winning British author more than 30 years earlier.Hadi Matar, 28, is already serving a 25-year sentence after he was convicted last year in state court of attempted murder for the 2022 knife attack that left Rushdie blind in one eye and with nerve damage.On Wednesday, a federal jury in Buffalo took less than two hours to convict Matar of all three charges — attempting to provide material support to the Iran-backed Hezbollah terrorist group, committing an act of terrorism that transcended national boundaries, and providing material support to terrorists, Reuters reported.He now faces a maximum of life in prison and is set to be sentenced on November 3.A HEZBOLLAH VETERAN IS HUNTING JEWS IN US COURTS — WE JUST NAMED HIM TO THE DOJHadi Matar, the man convicted of stabbing author Salman Rushdie arrives for his sentencing hearing at the Chautauqua County Courthouse in Chautauqua, New York, on May 16, 2025.(Geoff Robins / AFP)Federal prosecutors argued that Matar had been enraged by Rushdie's 1988 novel "The Satanic Verses," which portrayed a fictionalized version of Muhammad that many Muslims saw as blasphemous.A year later, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or a religious edict, urging Muslims across the world to kill Rushdie.
Iran's government later backed away from the fatwa, only for Khomeini's successor, Ali Khamenei, to reaffirm it in 2017, Reuters reported, citing the U.S.Attorney's Office.Prosecutors said Matar, who was born in the U.S.
but has Lebanese citizenship, spent more than a year studying the fatwa before attempting to fulfill it.He had also turned to Islam after a visit to the Middle East years before the eventual attack.On August 12, 2022, Rushdie was speaking at the Chautauqua Institution in Mayville, New York, when Matar rushed...