Salman Rushdie attacker convicted of terror offenses - BBC

What the report says

BBC News reports that Hadi Matar, the US man already imprisoned for trying to kill Sir Salman Rushdie, has been convicted in federal court of terrorism-related offences. A jury in Buffalo, New York, found the 28-year-old guilty on Wednesday of providing material support to Hezbollah and committing an act of transnational terrorism. Hezbollah, a Lebanese armed group and political movement, is designated as a terrorist organization by the US, UK and several other governments.

According to the BBC, prosecutors said Matar attacked Rushdie in response to longstanding calls for the author’s death, including Iran’s 1989 fatwa and a 2006 speech by Hezbollah’s then-leader urging its enforcement. They alleged Matar planned the attack for two years. The defence argued the stabbing was not driven by terrorism and questioned whether Rushdie’s 1988 novel The Satanic Verses had predictably provoked anger. Rushdie told the court that the book was not the subject of the trial.

Rushdie testified about being stabbed 15 times during the 2022 attack, including wounds to his face, chest, neck, eye and thigh. He credited a firefighter at the scene with helping save his life. The assault left him partially blind in one eye, and he later wrote about the attack and recovery in his memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

Matar was previously convicted in a New York state case and sentenced in 2025 to 25 years for attempted murder. BBC reports that the new federal conviction could expose him to a life sentence. The case matters because it adds a terrorism judgment to an attack rooted in decades of threats faced by one of the world’s best-known novelists.