Federal jury finds Matar provided material support to Hezbollah

A federal jury in Buffalo, New York, convicted Hadi Matar on Wednesday of providing material support to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah and engaging in an act of transnational terrorism, adding to a 25-year state prison sentence he is already serving for attempting to murder author Salman Rushdie.

The jury found Matar guilty of providing assistance to Hezbollah, which is designated a terrorist group by the United States, the United Kingdom, and many other countries. Prosecutors argued that Matar, 28, was motivated by a 2006 speech by the then-leader of Hezbollah calling for the 1989 fatwa against Rushdie to be enforced, and that he had plotted the attack for two years.

“The defendant decided no one was going to do it, so he had to do it,” Assistant US Attorney Timothy Lynch said in his closing statement, according to The Buffalo News. “The defendant is the one who answered that call.”

Rushdie, who was called to testify, described being stabbed 15 times, including in his cheek, chest, eye, neck, and thigh. He recounted an “enormous and expansive lake of blood” on the stage. He lifted the darkened lens on his glasses to show the wound to his eye, which left him partially blinded, and described the attacker’s knife coming within millimeters of his brain. Rushdie credited a firefighter with saving his life by providing medical care.

Defense attorneys argued that the attack was not motivated by terrorism and questioned Rushdie about whether he should have expected a backlash to his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. Rushdie replied, “I don’t believe the book is on trial. Somebody else is on trial.”

The British-Indian novelist was forced into hiding for nine years after Iran’s religious leader issued the fatwa calling for his death over the novel’s content, which some Muslims considered blasphemous. He later detailed his experience and recovery in a memoir, Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, and released his first fiction in years, The Eleventh Hour, last year.

Matar was convicted of attempted murder by a state court in 2025 and is already serving a 25-year sentence. He could now face life in prison on the federal conviction.