(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 of Hezbollah, according to an indictment unsealed on Wednesday.
The grand-jury indictment charges Hadi Matar, the New Jersey man already facing state murder and assault charges 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, who has Lebanese roots, has pleaded not guilty on the state murder and assault charges and is awaiting trial. He remains jailed in the Chautauqua County Jail in Mayville, New York.
Matar’s public defender, Nathaniel Barone, said that his client plans to plead not guilty to the federal charges.
Matar is expected to be arraigned later on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Buffalo, New York.
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.
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.
Rushdie released this year his memoir on the attack, “Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder”.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; editing by Donna Bryson and Rod Nickel)
