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The man convicted of trying to kill author Salman Rushdie went on trial again in the US on Wednesday, this time in a federal case that treats the 2022 stabbing as an act of terrorism. Prosecutors told a court in Buffalo that Hadi Matar attacked Rushdie to carry out a decades-old fatwa, or religious ruling, that called for the writer's death over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.
Matar, 28, has pleaded not guilty to federal charges that include engaging in an act of transnational terrorism. He is already serving a 25-year New York state prison sentence after being convicted of attempted murder and assault. Rushdie, 79, is expected to testify later this week. If convicted in the federal case, Matar could face a life sentence.
Opening the case, Assistant US Attorney Timothy Lynch said, "Fulfil the fatwa - that's what Hadi Matar intended to do." He told jurors that the Booker Prize-winning author and free speech advocate was attacked in front of an audience at the Chautauqua Institution, where he was about to speak on writer safety.
Defence lawyer Nathaniel Barone asked jurors to keep an open mind and said the case turned not only on what happened, but why it happened. "You're going to have to ask yourselves: What was Hadi Matar's intent?" Barone said in his opening statement.
Matar took notes on a yellow pad and rarely looked at jurors during the opening statements, at times shifting in his swivel chair. He appeared in court wearing dress trousers and a shirt that seemed too large.
The earlier attempted murder trial centred on the details of the knife attack. The federal case goes further into Matar's alleged motive. Prosecutors have said he acted out of loyalty to Iran's theocratic government and the Iran-backed Hezbollah militant group after the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called for Rushdie's death because of The Satanic Verses.
According to a 2025 court filing, Matar's electronic devices contained information on the fatwa seeking Rushdie's death. Prosecutors also said he kept a journal and sticky notes recording his research on Rushdie and possible ways and places to kill him. Federal agents also found photographs in his New Jersey bedroom of Khomeini and his successor, the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the filing said.
"When he attempted to carry out the fatwa, he believed he was doing so on behalf of" Hezbollah, which the US government designates as a terrorist organisation, Lynch and fellow Assistant US Attorney Charles Kruly wrote in the filing.
Rushdie was repeatedly slashed in the 2022 attack and was left blind in one eye. He later described the assault and his long recovery during Matar's state trial, in his memoir and in interviews. Speaking to The Associated Press in 2024, he said, "The thing that happens when you get really a close-up look at death - that's as close as you can get without actually doing the dance of death and heading off to nowhere - it stays with you. There's a shadow."
In the years before the federal trial, Matar's lawyers unsuccessfully tried to block some evidence from his social media accounts and other digital activity, arguing that the government's electronic searches were too broad. Matar did not testify in the state court trial, and it remains unclear whether he will testify in federal court. At his state sentencing, he said he believed in free speech but called Rushdie "a hypocrite" who "wants to bully other people". He also voiced support for Palestinians while entering and leaving the state courtroom.
Born in the US to Lebanese immigrant parents, Matar holds citizenship of both countries. His mother has said he became moody and withdrawn after a 2018 trip to Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based.
Rushdie was born in India, raised in Britain, where he was knighted by the late Queen Elizabeth II, and is now a US citizen. He won the Booker Prize in 1981 for Midnight's Children. He later became best known, and most controversial, for The Satanic Verses, especially a passage featuring a dream sequence about the Prophet Muhammad. Some Muslims considered the book blasphemous, and protests, often violent, followed. Khomeini's 1989 fatwa forced Rushdie into hiding for years. Although Iran has not focused on the decree in recent years, it has never been rescinded. Iran denied involvement in the 2022 stabbing, though its Foreign Ministry's then spokesperson said Rushdie had invited trouble by insulting Islam.
After publishing Knife, his memoir on the stabbing, Rushdie returned to fiction with last year's The Eleventh Hour, a collection of short stories and novellas. He was also given a Dayton Literary Peace Prize lifetime achievement award in November. The federal trial now shifts attention from the attack itself to whether prosecutors can prove that Matar carried it out as an act of terrorism linked to the long-running fatwa against Rushdie.
With PTI Inputs
