Man accused of stabbing Salman Rushdie charged with supporting terrorist group
24 July 2024, 18:14
Hadi Matar, 26, has also been charges with providing material to support Hezbollah.
A man who is accused of injuring author Sir Salman Rushdie in a knife attack in western New York faces a new charge that he supported a terrorist group.
The three-count indictment, unsealed in US 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 did not 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 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 October 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. “He plans on proceeding with a vigorous defence and maintains his innocence.”
Matar, 26, has been held without bail since the 2022 attack, in which he is accused of stabbing Sir Salman more than a dozen times as the acclaimed writer was onstage about to give a lecture at the Chautauqua Institution.
Knife wounds blinded Sir Salman in one eye. The event moderator, Henry Reese, was also wounded.
Sir Salman, who detailed the attack and his recovery in a memoir, had spent years in hiding after the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa, or edict, in 1989 calling for his death over Sir Salman’s novel The Satanic Verses, which some Muslims consider blasphemous.
Khomeini considered the book blasphemous.
Sir Salman re-emerged into the public in the late 1990s.
Matar was born in the US and lived in New Jersey but holds dual citizenship in Lebanon, where his parents were born. His mother has said that her son had become withdrawn and moody after visiting his father in Lebanon in 2018.
The attack raised questions about whether Sir Salman had been given 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 Sir Salman’s alleged stabbing focused partly on whether Matar had been acting alone or in concert with militant or religious groups.
