Salman Rushdie's alleged attacker faces federal terrorism charges

By Brad Brooks

(Reuters) -The man accused of attempting to kill author Salman Rushdie in New York two years ago now faces federal terrorism charges for his alleged support for Hezbollah, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday.

The grand-jury indictment charges Hadi Matar, the New Jersey man already facing state charges of attempted murder and assault for a 2022 knife attack on Rushdie, with three terror charges, including carrying out an act of terrorism and providing material support to Hezbollah, a U.S.-designated terrorist group that was founded by Iran in Lebanon during the early 1980s.

Matar faces life in prison if found guilty on the federal terror charges.

"We allege that in attempting to murder Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022, Hadi Matar committed an act of terrorism in the name of Hizballah ..." Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said in a written statement.

Iran's supreme leader at the time, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, pronounced a fatwa, or religious edict, calling upon Muslims to kill Rushdie upon publication of Rushdie's 1988 book, "The Satanic Verses," considered blasphemous by some Muslims. Rushdie, the acclaimed India-born novelist, then spent a decade in hiding.

Prosecutors allege that Matar was motivated in part by a 2006 speech given by Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah in which he endorsed the fatwa calling for Rushdie's death.

Hezbollah's media office in Lebanon did not reply to a request for comment on the charges tying Matar to the group.

Matar, who has Lebanese roots, has pleaded not guilty on the state charges of second-degree attempted murder and assault. He is detained in the Chautauqua County Jail in Mayville, New York, awaiting trial.

Matar was arraigned on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Buffalo, New York. His public defender, Nathaniel Barone, said his client would plead not guilty to the federal charges.

Matar is a Shi'ite Muslim. Hezbollah is a Shi'ite Islamist group and shares the ideology of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

While Iran's pro-reform government of President Mohammad Khatami distanced itself from the fatwa in the late 1990s, it was never lifted.

Rushdie was blinded in his right eye and his left hand was badly injured by the stabbing attack in August 2022 on a stage just as Rushdie was to deliver a lecture at an educational retreat near Lake Erie.

This year the writer released a memoir recounting the assault, "Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder."

(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; Additional reporting by Maya Gebeily in Lebanon; Editing by Donna Bryson, Rod Nickel and Daniel Wallis)