Hadi Matar, the man who stabbed author Salman Rushdie on a public stage in 2022, has been convicted of federal terrorism charges by a jury in Buffalo, New York. After just a few hours of deliberation, Matar, 28, was found guilty of engaging in an act of transnational terrorism and providing material support to Hezbollah, the Lebanese armed group designated as a terrorist organisation by the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. Matar is already serving a 25-year state prison sentence for attempted murder; he now faces a potential life term when federal sentencing is scheduled for 3 November.

Prosecutors built their case around a decades-long thread of ideological motivation. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran's late supreme leader, issued a fatwa — a religious edict — in 1989 calling for Rushdie's death over his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, which sparked widespread protests across the Muslim world over what some believers regarded as blasphemous depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. Although Iran's government distanced itself from the fatwa in 1998 and has denied involvement in the attack, the edict was never formally rescinded, and an Iranian foundation has offered a bounty of more than three million dollars for Rushdie's killing. Prosecutors argued that a 2006 speech by the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, calling for the fatwa to be enforced, served as a further catalyst. Electronic messages shown in court revealed that Matar spent months tracking Rushdie's whereabouts and public appearances, ultimately identifying his scheduled talk at the Chautauqua Institution, an arts and intellectual centre in western New York, as his opportunity. In a private note to himself, he had written: "We need to kill him ASAP."

Rushdie testified during the trial, describing being stabbed 15 times — to his cheek, chest, eye, neck, and thigh — as he was about to speak at an event on writers' safety. "I was on the stage, lying down, with an enormous pool of blood all around me," he told the jury. He lifted the darkened lens of his glasses to reveal the wound to his right eye, which has left him partially blind, noting that the blade had come "within millimetres from my brain." A firefighter in the audience is credited with providing the initial medical care that saved his life. The defence argued that Matar's actions were not terrorism and questioned whether Rushdie should have anticipated a violent reaction to his controversial novel. Rushdie responded simply: "I don't believe the book is on trial. Somebody else is on trial."

The case carries significance well beyond the fate of one man. Rushdie, a Booker Prize-winning author born in India and knighted by Britain's late Queen Elizabeth II, spent nine years in hiding after the original fatwa and had lived relatively openly for more than two decades before the attack. The verdict underscores the long reach of politically and religiously motivated violence, and US officials described it as a landmark moment. "His brutal attack on Mr. Rushdie during a peaceful speaking event is a chilling reminder of the global reach of Iranian terrorism," said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg. Rushdie has since published a memoir about the attack, entitled Knife, and returned to fiction with a new novel, The Eleventh Hour.