Man who attacked author Salman Rushdie charged with supporting terrorist group

BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) — A man who severely injured author Salman Rushdie in a frenzied knife attack in western New York faces new terrorism charges.

A three-count indictment unsealed in U.S. District Court in Buffalo on Wednesday charges Hadi Matar with attempting to provide material support to Hezbollah, a militant group based in Lebanon and backed by Iran. The indictment didn’t detail what evidence linked Matar to the group. It also includes charges of committing terrorism transcending national boundaries and providing material support to terrorists.

The federal charges come after Matar earlier this month rejected an offer by state prosecutors to recommend a shorter prison sentence if he agreed to plead guilty in Chautauqua County Court, where he is charged with attempted murder and assault. The agreement also would have required him to plead guilty to a federal terrorism-related charge, which hadn’t been filed yet at the time.

Instead, both cases will now proceed to trial separately. Jury selection in the state case is set for Oct. 15.

Matar was scheduled to appear on the new indictment Wednesday afternoon.

“Mr. Matar plans on denying the accusations in the indictment,” his attorney, Nathaniel Barone, said by phone. “He plans on proceeding with a vigorous defense and maintain his innocence.”

Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the 2022 attack, during which he stabbed Rushdie more than a dozen times as the acclaimed writer was onstage about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution. Knife wounds blinded Rushdie in one eye. The event moderator, Henry Reese, was also wounded.

Rushdie detailed the attack and his long and painful recovery in a memoir published in April.

The author spent years in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa, or edict, in 1989 calling for Rushdie’s death over his novel “The Satanic Verses.” Khomeini considered the book blasphemous. Rushdie reemerged into the public the late 1990s.

Matar was born in the U.S. but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. He lived in New Jersey prior to the attack. His mother has said that her son became withdrawn and moody after he visited his father in Lebanon in 2018.

The attack raised questions about whether Rushdie had gotten proper security protection, given that he is still the subject of death threats. A state police trooper and county sheriff’s deputy had been assigned to the lecture. In 1991, a Japanese translator of “The Satanic Verses” was stabbed to death. An Italian translator survived a knife attack the same year. In 1993, the book’s Norwegian publisher was shot three times but survived.

The investigation into Rushdie’s stabbing focused partly on whether Matar had been acting alone or in concert with militant or religious groups.