The man accused of attempting to murder author Salman Rushdie has been charged with terrorism for allegedly working on behalf of Hezbollah, according to documents released Wednesday.
Hadi Matar, a 26-year-old American of Lebanese descent who has already been charged by New York state over the 2022 stabbing attack, has now been indicted by a grand jury on three counts, including attempting to provide material to support a foreign terrorist organization, an indictment issued on July 17 but not yet unsealed.
The US Justice Department said the organization was Lebanon’s Iran-backed movement Hezbollah.
In August 2022, 77-year-old Rushdie lost the vision in his right eye after being stabbed on stage at an arts festival in New York state. Rushdie was stabbed nearly 10 times.
The New York-based Indian-American author has been receiving death threats ever since his 1988 novel “The Satanic Verses” was declared blasphemous by Iran’s supreme leader.
In 1989, that leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa, or religious edict, calling on Muslims worldwide to assassinate Rushdie.
The FBI said in a statement on Wednesday that Hezbollah supported the fatwa.
“We allege that by attempting to murder Salman Rushdie in New York in 2022, Hadi Matar committed a terrorist act in the name of Hezbollah, a terrorist organization affiliated with the Iranian regime,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a separate statement.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said, “The defendant attempted to enforce a fatwa, supported by Hezbollah, calling for the death of Salman Rushdie.”
The Justice Department said that between September 2020 and the summer of the attack, Matar tried to provide material support to Hezbollah by trying to issue a fatwa against Rashi.
The other two charges in the indictment charge Matar with engaging in terrorist acts across national borders and providing material support to terrorists.
– Life after the fatwa –
The award-winning author was stabbed multiple times in the neck and stomach at a New York literary conference before attendees and guards subdued the attacker.
Matar told the New York Post newspaper that he had only read two pages of Rushdie’s novel but believed it “attacked Islam.”
Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for the first decade after the fatwa, but for the past 20 years he has lived a relatively normal life in New York.
This year Rushdie published a memoir called “Knife” in which he describes a near-death experience.
In an interview with CBS’s “60 Minutes” program in April, Rushdie recalled how one of the surgeons who saved his life said: “First you get really unlucky and then you get really lucky.”
Rushdie said, “I asked, ‘What’s the lucky thing about that?’ And he said, ‘Well, the lucky thing is that the man who attacked you didn’t know how to kill a person with a knife.'”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
