{"id":718053,"date":"2026-07-29T22:56:09","date_gmt":"2026-07-29T22:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/718053\/"},"modified":"2026-07-29T22:56:09","modified_gmt":"2026-07-29T22:56:09","slug":"man-who-stabbed-salman-rushdie-in-2022-convicted-of-federal-terrorism-charges-salman-rushdie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/718053\/","title":{"rendered":"Man who stabbed Salman Rushdie in 2022 convicted of federal terrorism charges | Salman Rushdie"},"content":{"rendered":"

A man was convicted on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges in the 2022 stabbing of Salman Rushdie<\/a>, the author who has faced a decades-old death threat over his novel The Satanic Verses.<\/p>\n

A jury found Hadi Matar guilty of all the charges against him, including engaging in an act of transnational terrorism.<\/p>\n

Matar declined to take the stand, with his attorney Nathaniel Barone saying<\/a> earlier this week: \u201cAt this time, the defense rests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Matar, 28, is already serving a 25-year New York state prison sentence on an attempted murder conviction in the August 2022 attack on an amphitheater stage. The federal conviction carries a potential life sentence.<\/p>\n

Prosecutors allege <\/a>Matar shared propaganda videos before the attack and communicated with an Iran-based contact who claimed to know \u201cwhere to find Rushdie\u201d. They also say Matar asked whether the fatwa against Rushdie was still active.<\/p>\n

Rushdie, who had been about to speak on writers\u2019 safety, was slashed 15 times in front of a stunned audience. He was gravely wounded.<\/p>\n

Speaking<\/a> from the stand last February, Rushdie said: \u201cI became aware of a great quantity of blood I was lying in. My sense of time was quite cloudy, I was in pain from my eye and hand, and it occurred to me quite clearly I was dying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Following the attack, which also wounded Ralph Henry Reese, the moderator at Rushdie\u2019s planned lecture, Rushdie lost the sight in his right eye.<\/p>\n

According to<\/a> a federal indictment, Matar\u2019s motivation for trying to kill Rushdie stemmed from a 2006 speech delivered by Hezbollah\u2019s chief at the time, Hassan Nasrallah. In the speech, Nasrallah had endorsed a decades-old fatwa, or death warrant, placed on Rushdie by Iranian religious leaders more than 35 years ago as a result of his novel, The Satanic Verses<\/a>, which won Rushdie the Booker prize in 1981.<\/p>\n

In 2022, following Rushdie\u2019s stabbing, Matar admitted<\/a> to having read only \u201ca couple pages\u201d of the book that Iranian religious leaders denounced as blasphemous.<\/p>\n

In April 2024, Rushdie, who was born in India and moved to Britain as a teenager, wrote a memoir on his attempted assassination, which he titled Knife.<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter I finished writing the memoir, almost immediately, it\u2019s like a door in my head opened and the stories came back,\u201d Rushdie said <\/a>at Tulane University\u2019s New Orleans book festival in March.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d been really worried that I wouldn\u2019t be able to write fiction any more \u2026 because of trauma and the shocking impact of what happened,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Rushdie also said he was tired of being everyone\u2019s \u201cfree speech Barbie\u201d, adding: \u201cIt\u2019s a subject I\u2019m anxious to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t feel symbolic \u2026 I feel actual. I feel like I\u2019m a working writer trying to make his work,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The Associated Press contributed to this report<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man was convicted on Wednesday of federal terrorism charges in the 2022 stabbing of Salman Rushdie, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":718054,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-718053","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=718053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/718053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/718054"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=718053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=718053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=718053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}